CIOL:Autonomic data center is 3-5 years away

There are many terms to describe this technology. Cisco also has self-healing systems while HP calls it adaptive systems and Microsoft refers to it as dynamic systems initiative. The terms don’t matter. The important thing is we work together to make systems self-managed. To that end we all agree. We work with all these companies -Cisco, HP and Microsoft to do work in an open way.

How far has it evolved five years down the line?

We have come quite a way. In 2002, we started with some basic architecture and then we got the architecture encoded in an open fashion. We have the key concepts of AC ratified with standards bodies. We work with the W3C, Oasis and are leveraging open source foundations like Eclipse and Apache Foundation to both develop standards and also deliver open source applications based on that. Once you have that as a foundation, you can build some of the common tools and technologies. Some of the work on these base technologies will go on at the Bangalore center on AC that we have started. So IBM products and other companies can pick up the technology.

We have been working across the board in the last five years to make the AC vision possible. Today, there are 500 unique autonomic features within 75 IBM products. Even chips have the technology. eFUSE technology on a chip that can is programmed to blow up and go and open up a different part of circuitry and reroute in the Silicon on a different circuit. There are things we have done in the database products, application products and also system management.

The end goal is to make it all work together in what we call the autonomic data center. We are working with other companies to make this happen across data center elements including storage, hardware, software and networks. We have some amount of capability built in today but there is still work to do.

Does IBM have autonomic features embedded in products or do you also have specific AC products?

The answer is yes; we have both features and products. For example, DB2 has a self-managing capability as a feature.

At the systems level, IBM has products that are autonomic. The Enterprise Workload Manager (EWLM) for example monitors different workloads across various parts of the system-on the database and server, based on policies. This allows the system to adjust or optimize workloads. That’s an example of an AC product. The Tivoli provisioning manager is another example. This can monitor performance across different pools of servers. It locates a particular server’s failing and can dynamically provision a server in a closed loop process.

What are you doing on the inter-operability front?

We are driving interoperability through standards. One of the earliest AC standards under Oasis is the Wisdom Event Format or WEF for the IT data center. Before that every product had a different way of representing logs and traces of information. They needed a special person to understand those logs. With AC, we created the WEF standards, and now non-IBM products can benefit. So if you bring all the logs together, you can correlate and analyze the logs together. You can find out if a problem occurred in the storage or application server off the bat. This helps in problem determination. So that’s an area where we have coordinating activities both with vendors and also customers.

How far are you from the goal of the autonomic data center?

Ours is an ongoing roadmap. We are not at end of job. We are probably 3-5 years away from the autonomic data center. We have to have all the standards and interfaces in place to reach what we term as Level 5. We have a roadmap for AC that says there are five levels of achievement. Level 5 is when policies at the top set what needs to be achieved. We are now between Level 3 and Level 4.

Autonomic computing was started as a means of cutting out complexity. Are you working to help service providers in this task?

Definitely. IBM itself is a big service provider and we work closely with the services division. There are two reasons why we have chosen to have the autonomic computing technology center in Bangalore. One is that the research labs in Delhi and Bangalore generate a lot of technologies relating to AC. Another is to get the technologies to market. We can tap into the work that IBM service does by helping them manage data centers. IBM manages a lot of customer data centers right here in Bangalore. We are helping them get a lot of autonomic capabilities built into their job and also get feedback on how it is helping them. We are doing pilots and proof of concepts. These are very complicated IT environments running infrastructure required for networks. We are finding out the kind of problems they face.

Could you elaborate on the AC technology center in Bangalore?

The AC center in Bangalore is part of my team and attached to IBM software Labs. It is a catalyst organization that works within IBM, outside and others who drive the open standard for autonomic computing. The Bangalore team of 35 engineers will work on developing AC technologies in partnership with IBM Researcg in Delhi and Bangalore. We also want to extend relationships with potential universities such as IIT Bombay and IIT Delhi to collaborate around self-managing systems.

So far autonomic computing is being deployed mostly on the enterprise infrastructure side? Are you looking at areas like AC in remote tech support?

This is definitely an area we are working on. In every product of IBM, we have been delivering something called the IBM Support Assistant. This is used for data gathering, to facilitate the transfer of information from the customer to IBM to help with the diagnostics. Later this year, we will be shipping some of the self-healing technologies into the IBM Support Assistant. So the whole relationship of IBM to its customer on technical support will start incorporating AC.

The other part is when you want to send a fix out. We are also working on the way we distribute fixes, patches and updates. One of the initiatives of AC is self-configuring systems. We define the standard for the way to deliver these. When they get deployed, there will be an autonomic format that will read that format and performs the automation of the installation and will only implement it if the requirements are met. We hope the whole industry will adopt this self-configuring technology.

Will AC succeed in downsizing the manual intervention needed in managing data centers?

We have done studies of how people in a data center react to autonomic computing systems coming in. On one hand, it is positive. It takes away the mundane task away from their job. On the other hand, they would react negatively saying that it takes their job away. For the most part, customers will use it to take care of the repetitive tasks that freeze up your brain –backing up systems, log analysis and balancing workloads. It can free up the system administrator’s time and help cut down on the things that get in the way of getting their real job done. So the biggest impact is taking the mundane work management off the IT managers who can then start focusing on the business differentiating problems.

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