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General:
IBM Announces Blueprint For
Managing Complex Grids
IBM simplified the system design process for computers by introducing the
industry's first blueprint to assist customers as they begin to build
autonomic computing systems.
The company also plans to deliver the first in a series of open
technologies,
based on this blueprint, to help make IT systems more self-managing.
IBM is making the blueprint available free of charge and without royalty,
and
is working with third-party partners, customers and open standards committees
to help drive the architecture's continued evolution.
"Autonomic computing capabilities will emerge from innovative hardware and
software from a number of sources," said Alan Ganek, vice president, IBM
Autonomic Computing. "With this blueprint, IBM is suggesting a set of
technical guidelines to help ensure that those piece-parts are designed from
the start to work together effectively, regardless of their source. The best
way to achieve this is through the use of specifications that are open and
unencumbered."
The new autonomic blueprint provides a method for assembling technologies
from
diverse suppliers and facilitates an open process for automating the
management of complex information systems. The blueprint begins the process
of developing a common approach and terminology for architecting autonomic
computing systems.
It provides a consistent mechanism that different vendors can use to enable
the delivery of self-managing capabilities across the entire computing
environment. It outlines structured control loops to monitor, analyze and
react to changes within an IT environment. These loop collect information from
the system, make decisions and then adjust the system as necessary.
Intelligent control loops can enable the system to configure, heal, optimize
and protect itself.
Rather than being based on a proprietary platform, it leverages multiple
new
and emerging standards, including the Open Grid Systems Architecture and
Application Resource Measurement (ARM), into a more cohesive whole.
In addition to this blueprint, the company is providing developers with
technologies to help develop autonomic systems. The new technologies provide
developers and customers with building blocks that will enable them to produce
self-managed systems that are compliant within the framework of the new
blueprint.
The four technologies announced today each address core capabilities
required
for Autonomic Computing.
Log & Trace Tool for Problem Determination:
This tool helps alleviate the manual task of tracking down the cause of a
system problem, by putting the log data from different system components into
a common format, helping an administrator to more easily identify the root
cause more quickly. This tool will help bridge the gap between problem
determination and debugging of applications and middleware. By capturing and
correlating events from end-to-end execution in the distributed stack, this
tool allows for a more structured analysis of distributed application problems
that facilitates the development of autonomic self-healing and self-optimizing
capabilities.
ABLE (Agent Building and Learning Environment) Rules Engine for Complex
Analysis: Minimizing the need for developing complex algorithms required for
intelligent autonomic behavior. ABLE is a set of fast, reusable and scalable
learning and reasoning components that through the use of intelligent
monitoring software can capture and share individual and organizational
knowledge.
Monitoring Engine providing Autonomic Monitoring capability: This
technology
is designed to detect resource outages and potential problems before they
impact system performance or end-user experience. The monitoring engine has
embedded self-healing technology to allow systems to automatically recover
from critical situations. It uses advanced resource model technology to
capture, analyze, and correlate the key metrics that support its autonomic
capabilities. This technology, developed by Tivoli, enables more root-cause
analysis of critical resource issues and automated best practices for
initiating corrective actions. The Tivoli Autonomic Monitoring Engine will be
available in beta this summer and will ship with Tivoli Monitoring software
later this year.
Business Workload Management for Heterogeneous Environments: This initial
delivery will include utilizing the ARM standard to help identify the causes
of bottlenecks in the system through response time measurement, reporting of
transaction processing segments, and dynamic learning of transaction workflow
topology through servers and middleware. It then adjusts resources as needed
to ensure performance objectives are met. This technology will begin to
rollout in the IBM Tivoli Monitoring for Transaction Performance product.
Additional details about these technologies will be made available at IBM's
developerWorks Live! conference for software developers April 9 - 12 in New
Orleans.
In order to build a robust foundation for autonomic computing, it is
imperative that there exists an approach to standards and tools that
facilitates and encourages the development of open systems. The adoption rate
for developing autonomic computing systems depends on customers having access
to essential technologies and tools that make it easy to incorporate them into
their systems. IBM is delivering the foundation and the first in a series of
technologies to kick-start this process.
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