Clash of the server titans

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A battle royale is brewing among the server titans. IBM, Hewlett-Packard and Sun are busily mapping out strategies each hopes will give it the edge in the envisioned new world where self-healing, self-managing servers rule the network.

IBM has been the most vocal of late, aggressively promoting its autonomic computing concept, which includes self-healing, self-managing servers. Alan Ganek, vice president of IBM’s new autonomic computing division, paints a compelling picture of the networked world in which ultrasmart servers operate.

When outfitted with special software such as IBM’s Electronic Service Agent, he says, enterprise servers that are having problems automatically would send information about symptoms to a computer at IBM. Tapping into a comprehensive problem database, the computer would analyze the problem report and initiate corrective actions. It might send an electronic response to fix the problem itself, place a call to the enterprise’s administrative staff with recommend fixes or dispatch an IBM engineer to perform repairs.

"The result is simple — problems are fixed quickly, sometimes before you even knew you had a problem; your infrastructure becomes more resilient and downtime is minimized, thereby lowering your maintenance costs," Ganek says.

A ubiquitous problem

Though generating a lot of buzz recently, the notion of self-managing servers has been around for several years within the high-end server market, says Vernon Turner, a group vice president at IDC. The battle is heating up now, he says, because of one simple fact: "As servers become more and more of the industry standard or commodity devices, it is harder to differentiate each vendor from another."

Couple this with the reality that enterprise infrastructures commonly consist of thousands of servers — servers that users are demanding be easier to manage, always available and run at top capacity — and vendors have no choice but to rejuvenate their product lines, Turner adds.

Richard Fichera, a vice president with Giga Information Group, attributes the intensifying efforts around self-managing servers to an identical set of customer problems each vendor faces: stranded capacity, complex installations, difficulty of provisioning new applications and services quickly, and the inability to manage server networks on a service vs. an element basis. "Server management is a ubiquitous problem across all installed bases," he says.

And as server management issues escalate within enterprise organizations, talk of autonomic computing and utility data centers has been a real attention-getter among users. "The ability for anything to possibly manage itself is something that we would like to see, and it’s currently on our radar screen," says Aaron Merriam, network operating system/messaging specialist at Hannaford Brothers, a regional supermarket operator in Scarborough, Maine, that has about 400 servers today.