By Stevie Smith Nov 9, 2007, 13:28 GMT
International Business Machines (IBM) has this week moved to redouble its efforts to reduce the complexity associated with the IT world by revealing a host of new offerings that support the advancement of it Autonomic Computing Manifesto by delivering self-managing and self-healing computing systems.
IBM unveils new elements in its push to realise goal of self-healing and self-managing Autonomic Computing. Credit: IBM.
Following on from an initial goal set by the New York-based computer technology company some six years ago, IBM is looking for its new range of self-managing elements to provide business customers with "operational intelligence from the data center" to make better use of the intellect within their computing systems for the benefit of analysis, maintenance, operations, planning, resource deployment, strategy, and technology delivery.
This latest step in pushing IBM towards its goal sees Autonomic Computing users helped to significantly enhance "the management of energy consumption, assets and facilities, governance and risk, and finance and accounting." The company is keen to stress that its new technologies and services support its original Autonomic Computing goal, which is to establish Information Technology environments capable of regulating their own computing health in order to support and maintain specific business goals and policies.
"This was and remains a grand industry challenge that IBM issued to both itself as well as other IT companies," outlined Alan Ganek, VP of Autonomic Computing and CTO of IBM Tivoli software, regarding the manifesto and its intent to solve the problem of increasingly complex IT environments by creating systems that mimic the autonomic nervous system that regulates and protects human bodies.
"The difficulty is not the machines themselves – the industry has brilliantly exceeded goals for computer performance and speed," he added. "The challenge is to create the open standards and new technologies needed for systems to interact effectively, to enact predetermined business policies more effectively, and to be able to protect, heal and manage themselves with minimal dependence on human intervention."
IBM’s new (and updated) offerings support Autonomic Computing through the enhancement of operational intelligence, improved IT testing, monitoring and performance, and by assisting in the establishment of superior IT service management, and they are as follows:
IBM Tivoli Usage and Accounting Manager – Automated software for resource accounting, cost allocation and chargeback billing based on usage of resources, links to operation management to help improve overall IT cost management.
IBM Tivoli Security Operations Manager – Provides consolidated real-time dashboard to help customers keep their computer networks and systems up and running despite security threats from malicious outsiders, employees or contractors. The software autonomously analyses data from throughout the data centre to detect security threats, optimising and automating the process of incident recognition, investigation and response.
IBM OPTIMIZETest – Services offering that automates testing and assurance for IT operations. Speeds the IT testing process and autonomously provisions and manages computer systems on demand. Helps lower the cost of provisioning storage and server systems.
IBM Tivoli Monitoring – Availability and performance monitoring for IT resources, with key diagnostic data and automated corrective actions, to help improve the performance of IT applications performance and minimize and avoid availability interruptions.
IBM service management services – Provides strategy, planning, design and implementation services to help clients adapt accepted standards and practices to their unique computing environments. Supports best practices for service management, such as ITIL, to help improve IT service quality, efficiency and speed, improve resource management, asset management, change management and service management and produce a more resilient IT enterprise.
IBM Tivoli Change and Configuration Management Database – Provides a platform for implementing service management initiatives. It automatically tracks IT information spread across many computer systems within a company – including details about servers, storage devices, networks, middleware, applications and data – and helps IT staff understand the relationships and dependencies among these various components.
Since outlining its autonomic challenge in 2001, IBM has invested hundreds of millions of dollars into the research and development needed to simplify computing systems. It has so-far integrated autonomic capabilities into more than 500 product features across in excess of 100 products and services.
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