The effort is an attempt to bring some of the self-healing abilities of living creatures to the brittle world of computers, where component failures can bring down larger systems and ripple across a network to other computers as well.
"Just like the human body, when you sweat, it evaporates and cools you down," John Patrick, vice president of Internet technologies at IBM, said in an interview about the program. "And when you're cold, you shiver and that warms you up. When you cut your finger, you bleed and that heals the wound.
"Just like that, we're intending to invest in a broad range of software that will allow infrastructure to be self-managing and self-healing."
Analysts see IBM's effort putting the company at the front of an as-yet unproven market. "IBM's self-healing systems will definitely put pressure on other manufacturers to follow," said ARS Market Intelligence analyst Steve Greenberg. "But it is going to be interesting to see when this hits the market, or if it does at all."
"It's a long-term project," added Illuminata analyst Jonathan Eunice. "You'll see parts of it rolling out this year and next year. But if you're waiting for full delivery, you'll be waiting five years, eight years, 10 years. It's not a product; it's a vision statement."
But there are some differences between IBM's plan and actual biological systems. IBM essentially is patching today's computing technology, adding another layer on top of a very complicated system rather than employing radically different designs. For example, human brains, in some ways resembling a computer, sometimes can adapt to keep functions such as speech working despite serious damage.
IBM's Greg Burke will lead the multiyear effort, reporting to Irving Wladawsky-Berger--the man who led IBM's effort to embrace the Internet six years ago and the Linux operating system two years ago. Wladawsky-Berger will unveil eLiza at an analyst meeting Friday.
The effort will take place at five IBM research labs, the company said. It will consume a quarter of the company's server research funds.
The effort will consolidate several smaller programs under way within various groups at Big Blue. Hundreds will work on eLiza, Patrick said, spreading changes to all IBM's server lines, its storage products and software packages such as DB2, WebSphere and Tivoli.
With eLiza, computers would monitor everything from patterns in a power supply's electricity consumption to how many people are using a Web site, Patrick said. When the behavior of an element of the computing system starts showing the first indications of distress, automatic services would fire up backup systems, order replacement parts or take other measures to ensure that people using the system don't notice problems.
One element of eLiza will be a project called Project Oceano, a prototype that consists of a bunch of Linux servers that can share jobs among each other, with new servers being added into the mix or removed as necessary. The system can even install operating systems and stored data without human intervention.
Oceano probably will arrive as a product later this year, Eunice said.
"A lot of what you'll be seeing initially will be the evolution of IBM technology from the zSeries mainframe," Eunice said. For example, "processor sparing," in which spare CPUs can take over automatically when one stops working, will spread from mainframes to other server lines, he said.
