Autonomic transmission

"You'll see examples that are very concrete start to come out first, and then you'll see these start to become more sophisticated inside the products," predicts Catherine Lord, market intelligence director for Lotus Software.

"It's moving towards having a lot more of these business rules pre-defined," notes CA's Cooper. "The goal is to provide a lot more best practices and map them back to your business practices. As people gain confidence, these systems will be applied a lot more."

One of the most fundamental moves vendors are making towards autonomic systems is better integration with existing systems management software. That approach applies even in companies like IBM which are heavily researching other areas. "We are the heart of autonomic for IBM," notes Sandra Carter, vice president for marketing at Tivoli Software, IBM's systems management division.

Vendors who aren't already on the autonomic bandwagon (under whatever name) are likely to make the shift in the near future. "Most long lifecycle, complex products like aeroplane engines and medical products are self-diagnosed and self-healing today," says Robert Lax, a partner in Accenture's communications and high-tech practice. "But manufacturers of all complex, high-tech products should be thinking about the entire service management process as customers increasingly demand lower cost of ownership around those products."

One area where most observers agree more activity is needed is in developing sophisticated self-monitoring systems within software, rather than simply basic hardware-related alerts. "This is all about software," says EMC's Gold. "You can decide to dumb everything down, so the software does the same thing no matter what is there, or you can use built-in intelligence to make sure the best facilities are used when they're there."

Improvements will also be needed in other underlying technologies. "Network performance is one of the biggest barriers there is to realising the vision of self-managing systems," says Alan Noble, chief technology officer for Foursticks. "Any autonomic computer system today must be network based. The lifeblood of an autonomic system would be the network on which it depends. End-to-end network performance management at every network node, from router to PC to server, will enable more autonomy because it enables intelligence to be delivered to the network."

META analyst Van Hook believes the uptake of autonomic functions will be gradual and predictable. "During 2002-05, IT organisations will continue to deliver basic views of abstracted data (eg, business services, business flows) to themselves and their business organisations to monitor the health and activity of their environments," he wrote in a recent analysis. "This will stay at a monitor-only level through 2005, when control functions (eg, "allocate more resources to this business service") will begin to emerge (beyond the current element level). Through 2006, task optimisation for resource change and configuration (initially, servers; later, other elements) will emerge as a top-priority effort, and logical and physical configuration databases (where the changes are initially made) will appear in 40 percent of organisations by 2007. Autonomic efforts will remain fragmented indefinitely, but will enable operational staffing ratios (eg, administrators per server) to improve 100 percent by 2008."

Like most technology visions, the most sensible approach to autonomic computing may be gentle experimentation, rather than the whole-hearted embrace of a new and as yet largely untested model. "It's a gradual road map for how you advance your IT infrastructure down this path," says Telford. "In essence, this is evolution, not revolution."

Autonomic at a glance
What is it? Autonomic computing (a term originally promoted by IBM) is based on the concept of IT systems that can intelligently monitor, manage, and heal themselves without requiring human intervention. It can be described less fancifully as self-managing systems.

How will it help my business? If the autonomic vision is fully realised, IT staff numbers and costs will be reduced, and businesses will be able to define their needs in terms of business policies rather than technological capabilities.

Do I need to worry about it now? Having autonomic capabilities in place may help immediately in cutting costs, but better implementations will become possible over the next 18 months.

What are the potential problem areas? Most current autonomic systems are fairly basic, and software integration could prove complex.

The five STages of autonomy

IBM's original vision for autonomic systems identifies five basic evolutionary stages for IT systems:

• Level 1 (Basic) Multiple sources of system generated data, requires highly skilled staff.
• Level 2 (Managed) Consolidation of data and management tools, greater system awareness, improved productivity.
• Level 3 (Predictive) System monitors and recommends actions, staff approves and initiates actions, faster decision making.
• Level 4 (Adaptive) System monitors and initiates actions, staff manage against service level agreements.
• Level 5 (Autonomic) System monitors and initiates actions based on business processes, IT focuses on enabling business needs.

Going overboard
Despite the downplaying of the original bioscience elements and the simplicity of the overall concept, the autonomic vision remains as susceptible to technobabble as any other futuristic vision. "To build a rich-media service grid for automatically managing the life-cycle activities of services, it is essential to have an automatic resource management system to provide a cost-bounded capacity guarantee illusion to services over distributed heterogeneous resources," HP Labs researchers Yong Yan and Bo Shen noted in a recent paper. Answers on the back of a postcard, please.

Virtual Offis cuts costs with blade
Managed service provider Virtual Offis has been one of the first local businesses to dip its feet into the autonomic computing pool. Indeed, the Sydney-based company is the first purchaser in the Asia Pacific region of IBM's BladeCenter server, which incorporates many of Big Blue's early autonomic technologies (we'll compare the blade server offerings from all the major vendors in next month's T&B). "While it's an emerging technology, we believe it's perfectly suited to our business model," explains CEO Craig Allen. Virtual Offis customers include Manchester Unity, Australia Post, and the Australian Institute of Company Directors.

Virtual Offis runs data centres at Pyrmont and Mosman in Sydney, and Allen has been increasingly exasperated at the effort needed to maintain those servers. "As the systems get bigger and more complex, they're going to get harder to manage. It's not like looking for a needle in a haystack, it's like looking for a needle in a silo," he says. "The complexity of these systems is getting way out of hand. Most of my staff are managing basic operational issues. I would rather have those guys freed up for more important issues, and for them to be available when things are coming to a crux. I'm looking for technology where a server can fix problems by itself." With self-healing, "you free up more time for your operation," he says. "We expect to have a server setup which is like electricityyou don't have to think about whether it's there."

Allen estimates that the time taken to shift a set of applications from one server to another can be up to 2= hours. That can prove to be an expensive prospect, especially if the cause of the failure proves to be a $10 fan. As hardware to allow failovers is already in place, the basic cost of an autonomic system is not much higher than existing systems, but should provide greater reliability. (The fan itself shouldn't prove to be a problem: the BladeCenter has two dedicated blowers, and "when things are going wrong, they sound like a Boeing taking off," Allan says.)

In practice, the question of whether the server can be trusted to make the correct decisions hasn't proved to be a problem. "We're more interested in making sure that the server's available, and, if something does go wrong, it can fix itself," says Allen. "You don't want to know how it works; you just want to know that it's running."

In the future, Allen is confident there'll be more sophisticated approaches to autonomic computing. "While I think the IT hardware infrastructure is moving in that direction, the operating systems and the applications are going to take a little longer. They're the next layers to get on board. The smarts are not really at the applications layer yet," although technologies such as automatic updates are an early step in that direction, he says.

Ultimately, most users won't be concerned with whether a system is autonomic or not, Allen predicts. "The way that we sell it to our customers is that we're removing a layer of skill sets that doesn't offer ROI. Customers can actually get more bang for buck by using this type of technology."

Right here, right now
Overall, the hype surrounding autonomic computing is well ahead of the realitybut that doesn't mean we're in a total vapourware zone. Here's half-a-dozen products which claim some level of autonomic-style smarts.

Corosoft Datacenter Automation Product Suite
Linux specialist Corosoft provides a range of products designed to ensure ongoing datacentre availability without human intervention via proactive management tools. "Corporations suffer from inefficient and manual methods of administrating datacentre infrastructure," says CEO Julian Elliott.

EMC Centera
EMC's Centera storage management software monitors available storage capacity, distributes and creates extra copies of data according to demand and perceived problem areas, and ensures at least two copies of all stored data are always available. "It makes sure it's getting the optimum performance," says Clive Gold, ANZ marketing director for EMC.

Foursticks NP
South Australian network management software developer Foursticks aims to provide network connectivity solutions that can automatically vary with available bandwidth. "We don't require hard guarantees like other networking systems," says Foursticks chief technology officer Alan Noble.

HP AlphaServer
As well as being the last products actually based on the now discontinued Alpha processor line, the current line of AlphaServers from HP (via Compaq and Digital) include integrated server management technologies. "As part of our customers' adaptive infrastructure, we believe these systems are critical in meeting their needs for the next two to four years," says HP vice president for business critical systems Scott Stallard.

Lotus Domino
The first step into autonomic computing for Lotus' popular collaboration server has been in addition of Tivoli's Analyzer system to the product for load balancing. "It becomes predictive, and then it becomes self-tuning," explains Catherine Lord, market intelligence director for Lotus Software.

Touchpaper Vega
Touchpaper's IT service management product Vega includes both network management and automated help desk components. "The whole Vega suite is underpinned by the concepts of autonomic computing," says CEO Graham Ridgway.

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