In an industry that loves buzzwords, autonomic computing continues to attract attention. Can the promise of self-managing IT systems ever be met, and how will businesses change if that happens?
In the beginning, it was all about sweat. If your body temperature becomes too high, you will sweat automatically. You don’t need to think “Gee, I’d better start perspiring”, because the sweating function is controlled by your autonomic nervous system, which is also responsible for many other key bodily functions such as breathing and making sure your heart continues to beat.
IBM research vice president Dr Paul Horn appropriated this concept in late 2001 when he launched IBM’s Autonomic Computing Manifesto, which defined an approach to computing based on building, in effect, an autonomic nervous system for IT. Rather than requiring administrators to check them all the time, IT systems should be capable of monitoring and managing themselves, Horn reasoned. What else are we going to use all that processing capacity for?
Since that time, IBM has stuck doggedly to its vision of incorporating autonomic technologies into its products, and many other vendors have also talked up the concept. The notion of autonomic computing seems here to stay, but does it offer real benefits?
Defining autonomic
In its autonomic computing FAQ, IBM defines the concept as follows: “Autonomic computing is an approach to self-managed computing systems with a minimum of human interference.”
And why don’t we want human interference? Because it costs money. “Although the costs of IT continue to go down, the overall cost of managing the IT infrastructure continues to rise,” says Ric Telford, director of autonomic computing architecture at IBM. In other words, it’s cheaper to buy stuff these days, but the more you get, the harder it is to control and the more people you need to employ to do that. “You can’t have an on-demand business with the current complexity that systems have today,” says Telford. “Complexity drives the amount of management associated with an IT infrastructure.
“Forty percent of IT costs today are on staff and administration,” he adds. “At least one-third of that is focused on administrative tasks and the basic management of the infrastructure. The ultimate goal of autonomic computing is to allow the IT infrastructure to be managed and controlled by what your business processes are.”
Part of the reason for the shift is that system complexity can quickly move beyond the level of individual comprehension. “Simple things such as running out of disk space should be easy to spot, but with so many components to watch, that could be a person’s job just to check it,” says Graham Ridgway, CEO of software vendor Touchpaper. “The number of parameters to monitor means you either need an automated rules-based system or an army of experts.”
Although the autonomic label has caught on, IBM’s rivals are quick to point out that the vision isn’t entirely fresh. “It’s a new name for something that people have been doing for quite a while,” says Andy Cooper, marketing manager for information management solutions at Computer Associates (CA). “We’ve been working towards that goal for about five years.” The autonomic vision also has many elements in common with HP’s utility-driven view of the universal data centre.
Even the notion of building systems that emulate in some way the biological functions of humans is not unique to IBM. Microsoft, always quick to latch onto a popular vision, has also talked up the concept. “The service components and even the systems themselves have to exhibit more properties that are almost like the biological metaphors where they’re self-organising and self-healing. Without that it will be hard to believe that people will be able to keep up with the amount of computing capability that surrounds them in their daily lives,” Microsoft chief technical officer of advanced strategies and policies Craig Mundie told a security conference last year.
IBM these days is placing less emphasis on the biological origins of the autonomic vision, effectively using the concept as shorthand for a range of self-managing and self-healing technologies. “I wouldn’t say it was a conscious shift,” explains Telford. “After a while, once you feel like that message has gotten across, it’s not so important to focus on where that idea came from as where you want to go with it.”
That point notwithstanding, “I think [bioscience] will clearly be an area to continue to tap into,” Telford says. “Part of the initiative is to focus on working with universities and academia—it isn’t an IBM-centric initiative—we want to drive it, but we want the good ideas to come from all over. That’s a rich area for potential advancement of new technology.”
Could it possibly work?
For IT managers, the promise of autonomic computing is obvious, but enthusiasm will inevitably be tempered by a hard-earned cynicism. “Although these efforts will be a distant reality for many organisations, the idea behind them is attractive—that of a robust computing environment, which essentially manages itself to the level that human intervention is rarely needed,” says analyst Herb Van Hook of META Group. “We believe the reality is somewhere in between the current state (intensive device-level management) and the vision by vendors promoting autonomic solutions. Self-healing and self-managing elements, components, and environments will (and are) occurring, but operational policies should still be set, and not every possible failure or performance issue can be accounted for automatically. Users should exploit the technological innovation of autonomic models where possible, but every computing environment will retain its uniqueness.”
Even vendors acknowledge that businesses may be reluctant to turn over all their management functions to the IT systems that are perceived as having often let them down in the past. “It’s a business issue more than a technology issue,” says CA’s Cooper. “There can be a reluctance to trust the system. All these systems can be set up to follow a series of actions. It’s a question of whether the [human] expert wants to let that happen.”
One way of developing trust in autonomic systems may be to first apply them in areas which are relatively stable, such as long-term data storage. “The majority of information that gets stored doesn’t ever change,” says Clive Gold ANZ marketing director for EMC. “If you want to create a system that’s going to look after this information forever, you can achieve that.”
However, that approach may have its limits. “One of the primary reasons for today’s complexity is overspecialisation,” notes IBM’s Horn. “For decades, the industry has worked to solve problems at a micro level, rather than taking a holistic view. Autonomic computing is an attempt to shift gears and make sure ‘smaller, faster, cheaper’ is no longer pursued in isolation, but in the context of making systems work better and smarter.”
Early attempts at full automation have shown promising results. Research carried out by HP Laboratories into automated storage solutions found that when fully automated, overall performance was within 15 percent of that achieved by a traditional interventionist IT manager. While the ultimate goal might be to match human performance, many businesses might accept a slight reduction in performance as a trade-off against ongoing staff costs.
Another challenge for autonomic systems is to provide integrated management over the full scope of IT activities. Analysts are cautiously confident that currently separate initiatives can eventually combine into a single system. “Linux, e-sourcing, eLiza and autonomic computing, and grid computing have incubated separately within IBM for years. [In 2002], IBM brought these initiatives into a coherent strategy,” says Gartner analyst Thomas Bittman. (Incidentally, Gartner itself favours the label “policy-based computing services” rather than “autonomic computing”, but that’s something of a mouthful.)
IBM’s original manifesto for autonomic computing defines five evolutionary stages for autonomic systems, and that vision is broadly endorsed by others in the industry. While level 5 (full autonomic systems) is the end goal, even reaching level 3—where recommendations are routinely made by systems monitoring software—would represent a significant step forward for many businesses, and offer real and immediate benefits in terms of cost saving and administration.
If autonomic computing can deliver completely on its promises, then its impact could be profound, especially as businesses continue to accumulate and develop more complex IT systems. “Being able to see through the storm and quickly recognise the problem has real value,” says CA’s Cooper. Users working with simple autonomic systems are already reporting benefits.
As autonomic systems grow in popularity, that influence could spread. “When the systems, networks, and applications that make up the Internet don’t need constant attention, the Internet can grow to serve new areas,” says Concord vice president Douglas Batt. “The result is the positive influence on end users and the economy as a whole to leverage the power of the Internet for training, learning, and communicating.”
Similar benefits could apply in more basic areas such as storage. “It’s going to change things dramatically. People say that storage is a utility, but no other utility takes so much time to run,” says EMC’s Gold. “You just switch on the lights and they work, but storage isn’t there yet. Businesses are not in business to run storage infrastructure, although more and more businesses exist because of information. Business wants to drive down the cost, and the whole issue with traditional storage is staffing.”
“The business approach to IT will be to expect it to be a reliable tool that really helps with the aims of the business, rather than a hit-or-miss thing that causes pain, complaints and an excuse for poor performance,” says Touchpaper’s Ridgway.
