AUTONOMIC COMPUTING—WHY NOW? There are four answers to the question of how we know the time of autonomic computing has come: -
Computing infrastructure and system complexity demands it. -
The current business climate demands it. -
The technology has evolved enough to deliver it. -
We must act to prevent the situation becoming any worse. First, computing systems continue to evolve to meet changing business needs. But process-based computing systems are more complex than any of the preceding paradigms. Dynamic process-based computing systems give corporations the ability to automate business processes and the flexibility to optimize and adapt processes according to their business needs. These systems interconnect all aspects of doing business and integrate multiple business applications. Integration results in computing infrastructures that are both interconnected, because multiple technologies are involved in delivering business services and processes, and dynamic, because new application modules and functions can be added at a faster rate. Technology interconnection and dynamism breed maintenance difficulties for three reasons: -
It becomes impossible for manual-user administration, technology maintenance, and management processes to keep pace with the rate of infrastructure change. -
Management of individual technologies and software modules does not guarantee the availability and performance of the end-to-end service or process. -
Inter-relationships between individual technologies and software modules increase the complexity of configuration, performance, and security problems that need to be resolved. Second, almost every Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) study shows that the more moving parts a system has, the more expensive it is to maintain in good working order. Indeed, the current rule of thumb is that for every dollar spent on computing infrastructure, another ten are spent for ongoing management. This ratio increases as system complexity grows. Eventually the growing cost structure becomes too much for the corporation to bear, even when the economy as a whole is performing well. The current weak spending environment places enormous pressure on IT departments to lower costs and increase the returns delivered by existing infrastructure. There is only one way to do that in an IT operations center. That is to automate tasks that are normally handled by people. The autonomic computing technology provides executives a blueprint for increasing the cost-effectiveness of their IT departments. Finally, IT management technology has been evolving to deliver true "lights out operations," a concept for computing infrastructures having distributed processing power, modular software architectures, accessibility over public networks, and frequent configuration changes. Until now, these trends have been developing separately, related only by the basic concept of increasing the intelligence of management tools. The time to act is NOW. |