IBM has taken its vision of autonomic IT past the planning stage with a series of product launches and business partner initiatives it hopes will make self-healing computer systems a reality.

The firm hopes that autonomic systems will transform the way datacentres operate, but a likely lack of co-operation between interested parties will mean that short-term gains will be incremental.

The immediate impact of autonomic computing is likely to be felt among users of IBM's Tivoli enterprise systems management framework. The Tivoli Transaction Monitoring for Transaction Processing 5.2 release in July will complete a basic set of resources for automatic discovery and resolution of problems that degrade performance or cause crashes.

The product's new Just In Time Instrumentation feature will allow administrators to turn on "deep monitoring" of applications on the fly to locate and correct root-cause problems, according to Carl Kessler, Tivoli products vice president. Best-practice fixes can also be captured and applied so that issues do not reappear, he added.

The longer-term hope is that by adding component-level autonomic capabilities to monitoring, identity management, risk management, storage management and service-level management software over the next 18 months, datacentre drudge work will be massively reduced. IBM is also promoting autonomic capabilities by putting early views of software on its AlphaWorks Web site and through the support of IBM Global Services consulting staff on best-practice implementation.

However, although IBM is putting autonomic capabilities across an array of its own hardware and software products and has been working on the technology for years, the broader picture for cross-platform autonomic computing re-quires co-operation. "It will take an industry effort to hit the goals we're shooting for," said Alan Ganek, IBM vice president for autonomic computing. "We're taking a step-by-step approach."

IBM is recruiting business partners that will also add autonomic capabilities that comply with Web services and Open Grid Services Architecture standards. "[Autonomic programs] must manage themselves and manage relationships with other elements through negotiated agreements," Ganek said. A database must negotiate with a storage array to obtain resources, for example.

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