 |
|
DAILY NEWS AND INFORMATION
FOR THE GLOBAL GRID COMMUNITY /
|
Applications:
IBM EMBRACES ECLIPSE ENVIRONMENT
FOR AUTONOMIC COMPUTING
IBM announced the availability of an Eclipse-based Autonomic Computing
Toolkit
for developing self-managing capability in IT environments. The toolkit will
be the first integrated collection of assets and tools, with support provided,
to assist software developers in designing and testing autonomic
solutions.
The Autonomic Computing Toolkit will help developers integrate autonomic
computing capabilities into their applications. The toolkit is built to work
with the IBM Software Development Platform, a comprehensive set of tools and
shared set of proven best practices to build, integrate, extend, modernize and
deploy applications in an on demand world.
"IBM is committed to establishing and supporting standards for autonomic
computing in the industry," said Alan Ganek, vice president of autonomic
computing at IBM. "Eclipse is emerging as a common development framework for
companies who want to 'jump start' the creation of autonomic solutions within
their enterprise."
The toolkit contains embeddable components, tools, usage scenarios and
documentation consistent with IBM's autonomic computing reference
architecture, first outlined in the Autonomic Computing Blueprint published by
IBM in April 2003.
Web services, utility computing, .NET, CPU harvesting and distributed
computing are just a few of the technologies that fall under the Grid
computing umbrella. Gt04 -- a premiere enterprise Grid computing conference
targeting industrial and commercial users -- will gather experts, and outline
strategies and road maps for Grid deployment. For more information, visit
www.gt04.com.
Grid computing is here!
Leading companies participated in the successful beta run of the toolkit,
including Hitachi Software Engineering Co Ltd (HSE), InstallShield Software,
NetFuel Inc, NS Solutions Corp, Opalis Software, Singlestep Technologies,
Toshiba Solutions and Zero G Software Inc.
"One of the most important goals for creating mission critical IT systems
is
to minimize meantime to repair in an unexpected system failure, maximizing
meantime to failure at the same time," said Atsushi Kihira, department manager
of Internet Business department at Hitachi Software Engineering. "At Hitachi
Software Engineering, we incorporated autonomic computing technologies into
our Web system development tool, Assam anyWarp, and our e-commerce solution
for retail industries, j-Retail@Solution, which has reduced meantime to repair
among multiple e-commerce vendors, thus helping improve our customers'
satisfaction. As a software vendor, I believe that it is HSE's task to support
autonomic computing technologies by providing more concrete product plans and
address potential customer needs."
"In today's heterogeneous IT environment, systems management has become
increasingly complex," said Takashi Oshiro, director at NS Solutions.
"Adopting autonomic computing technologies into our IT infrastructure, which
includes IBM, Sun Microsystems and Oracle components, facilitates availability
improvements. I believe it will not only differentiate our technical support
skills and experience, but it will also accelerate standards efforts under
way."
The Autonomic Computing Toolkit contains components for four core autonomic
technology areas:
- The Autonomic Management Engine (AME) monitors events, analyzes them,
then
plans and executes corrective action on a computing resource. When integrated
with the other toolkit technologies, the AME is the facilitator of an
autonomic self-management system.
- The Integrated Solutions Console provides a web-based infrastructure
based
on industry-standard technologies to address the need for common system
administration in a customer's IT environment such as setup, configuration,
run-time monitoring and control, with a consistent look and feel. Tools
provided include a run-time environment, documentation on developing
components, Javadoc for Integrated Solutions Console and related APIs, and
sample components.
- Solution Installation and deployment technologies, a core component of
IBM's self-configuring autonomic capability, will enable enterprises and
independent software vendors to identify, validate and act upon software
interdependencies and prerequisites across the totality of their
infrastructures, and will reduce installation and configuration failures. The
set of technologies delivered include a consistent way to describe the
solution and dependency information in an XML format that can be used as part
of the install and post-install process and a set of run-time libraries that
includes a dependency manager and support for populating the inventory of
hardware and software into a common repository.
- Problem Determination autonomic technologies and standards are part of
IBM's development of self-healing capabilities, laying the foundation for
systems and networks to detect, analyze, correlate, and resolve IT problems
and automatically diagnose the root cause of problems in complex environments.
Included in the toolkit are:
- The Common Base Event format, previously submitted by IBM to the OASIS
standards body, is envisioned as the basis for standardized exchange of
problem determination data.
- The Generic Log Adapter for Autonomic Computing, a tool to convert
existing log files to the Common Base Event format. This component helps
software developers adapt their applications to the format without the need to
re-write the applications.
- The Log and Trace Analyzer for Autonomic Computing, a tool which
supports reading logs in the Common Base Event format, correlating the logs
based on different criteria and viewing the correlated log records -- enabling
faster root cause analysis and problem determination in the end-to-end
heterogeneous environment.
The toolkit will also include documentation such as online tutorials, user
guides and developer guides. Supported platforms for the toolkit are IBM AIX,
Linux on Intel systems and Windows2000. This is the first release of the
toolkit, with expected releases containing new features and functionality
planned throughout the year. Developers can access the toolkit, as well as
additional information about autonomic computing, on ibm.com/autonomic.
IBM is also expanding its resources for developers with a new Autonomic
Computing collection on its developer site at
ibm.com/developerWorks/autonomic. This collection of
resources will be
updated on a weekly basis, and will feature tools, tutorials, articles, forums
and how-to's on creating autonomic computing applications to transform
businesses into on demand environments.
|