Autonomic authority

Why autonomic computing? Effect on skilled IT personnel What’s being done now? Getting started Spurring investment Technical hurdles The future

Whether you believe all you are hearing these days about autonomic computing - or remain skeptical - you have to admit, the message is appealing. The major infrastructure players, HP, IBM and Sun, paint a picture of a new data center which is self-managing, self-healing and self-provisioning. Such autonomic computing capabilities will contribute to a broader utility infrastructure that can react on the fly to changes in demand, providing a constant level of service, much like a public utility. This, in turn, will allow IT executives to focus on strategic business issues rather than manual maintenance tasks.

Network World asked key strategists at these companies, and at Microsoft, storage management vendor Veritas Software and server virtualization specialist VMware (now an EMC business unit), to share their ideas about autonomic computing.

Why do we need autonomic computing?

Greg Papadopoulos, CTO, Sun: In a word, 'complexity.' Complexity has accumulated to a point where we no longer have an economy of scale in IT. What's called for is real automation of service levels in the data center, not some organic-sounding marketing buzzword. We're talking about designing in the capability for resource virtualization, application provisioning, service-level provisioning - tools to help make the most of existing IT resources. I'm a little skeptical of the idea that computers can act like people and heal themselves. True automation of the data center is not a soft, abstract principle; it requires a very strict, deep, engineering discipline. We have to do the hard work of making things simple.

Nora Denzel, senior vice president and general manager of HP's Software Global Business Unit and Adaptive Enterprise Program: There was always a need, but the need couldn't be fulfilled earlier. Up until the past few years, there weren't industry standards. There wasn't the bandwidth capacity to link disparate computers across long distances. Some of the technology we needed, such as virtualization, the ability to break up programs into small pieces, hadn't been invented yet. What we're seeing is a new cycle of computing that is finally possible.

Irving Wladawsky-Berger, vice president of technology and strategy, IBM: We need to find innovative ways to manage the increasing complexity of business and IT. Because technologies have been more readily available to us, most environments are now made up of heterogeneous components. More than 40% of all IT expenditures are invested in just getting these technologies to work together. At the end of the day, we need autonomic computing to make IT more self-managing - that is, self-configuring, self-optimizing, self-healing and self-protecting. People then will be shielded from IT's complexity, the infrastructure will work around the clock and be as near-impervious to attacks and threats as possible, and the business can make the most efficient use of increasingly scarce support skills.