IBM Releases Blueprint For Automated Computing

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April 04, 2003 (2:44 PM EST)

IBM Releases Blueprint For Automated Computing

IBM unveiled Friday an automated computing blueprint that the company says is an initial step toward standardizing the emerging IT systems. The proposal suggests a set of technical guidelines for ensuring that pieces of the system will work together, even if they are from different vendors.

IBM, along with competitors Hewlett-Packard Co. and Sun Microsystems Inc., are among several high-tech companies marketing the idea of networked computing systems that require little help from IT staff to run and maintain. Sun's N1 initiative and HP's Utility Data Center products look to automating mostly data center operations. HP's initiative also addresses system management.

Microsoft Corp. has launched its Dynamic Systems Initiative, which seeks to build software that automatically distributes computing demand among servers and applications.

IBM says its autonomic computing plan is broader than other companies, including both components and entire networked systems. The Armonk, N.Y., company is embedding automation features across its servers, databases, middleware and system management applications.

The IBM blueprint begins the process of developing a common approach and terminology for designing automated systems, Alan Ganek, vice president of IBM's autonomic computing unit, said. The proposal suggests the design of "control loops" that monitor, analyze and react to changes within an IT environment. These intelligent mechanisms would be configured to collect information from the system, make decisions and then adjust the system as necessary.

The blueprint also focuses on the use of emerging open standards, including the Open Grid Services Architecture, a set of standards for ensuring quality of service across a grid-computing network.

In addition to the blueprint, IBM unveiled four toolkits to assist IT organizations in building automated systems based on the company's blueprint:

--Log and Trace helps track down the cause of a system problem by putting log data from different components into a common format accessible by monitoring software.-- Agent Building and Learning Environment (ABLE) Rules Engine for Complex Analysis embeds logic within an application to give it decision-making capabilities for self-healing. --Autonomic Monitoring Engine is meant to detect resource outages and potential problems before they impact system performance. --Business Workload Management uses the Open Group standard, Application Resource Measurement, to respond to system bottlenecks.