Difficulties lie behind the supplier hype for self-managing
systems.
Last week, Hewlett-Packard announced the launch of its Self-healing
Software Services for Openview, its integrated systems management
package, in a push for the industry to implement self-managing
computer systems to ease the burden of repairing faults.
HP believes IT systems should be able to manage themselves, rather
than rely on armies of support staff. Systems should be more
intelligent and be able to react to a changing IT environment as
the human body adapts to avoid potential problems.
While this concept may seem attractive to IT directors, closer
inspection shows that there are many practical difficulties in
replacing existing technology with self-managing systems.
Bola Rotiba, a senior analyst at Ovum, said there should be common
software standards across the industry. "If you only buy from one
supplier, such as HP, that should be fine. But a lack of standards
could cause problems for users."
For self-management to work, Rotiba said, applications need to
communicate closely with the system management software, but the
danger is how closely the application is linked to the system
management tool.
If the link is too tight, applications will need to support
proprietary system management interfaces rather than open
standards, leading to complexity and additional expense.
HP's interpretation revolves around a self-healing software
"engine". The company said the engine automatically detects faults
and analyses system information but there is still a need for
intervention from support staff who act on the recommendations the
engine provides.
The ultimate aim, according to Paul Hodgetts, software business
unit director at HP, is full automation without human intervention.
"You should be able to configure a system to perform certain tasks
in response to identified problems," he said.
Sun Microsystems offers the N1 architecture which is also designed
to manage servers and storage dynamically. Jonathan Mills, product
specialist at Sun, said the aim of the architecture was to manage a
standard application within N1 without modification to the
application. The system manages itself and is able to bring new
systems online if it fails.
A more radical approach to self-managing systems is Microsoft's
Dynamic Systems Initiative, which allows applications to be
engineered to interpret whether they are running efficiently.
Michael Emmanuel, senior product manager at Microsoft, said,
"Applications need to participate in their own management."
IBM also predicts a change in the ways applications are built to
make them self-managing through its autonomic computing strategy.
Last month, the company announced a number of technologies that
form the basis of its self-managed strategy, including problem
determination, policy-based management and heterogeneous workflow
management.
The self-healing software focuses on four areas: self-healing,
self-optimisation, self-configuration and self-protection.
It also unveiled an autonomic toolkit for software developers,
designed for building IT management into applications.
While IBM was developing technology around its autonomic computing
strategy, Kevin Denyer, manager of the customer programme for
autonomic computing at IBM, said industry standards were not yet in
place for most of these technologies.
Rather than expect the industry to agree on one common standard,
Denyer said IBM is fighting for a formal interchange based on XML
to allow different approaches to self-managed IT to work
together.
According to Denyer, the move to self-managed IT systems will have
a marked effect on the IT skill set. "The technology will be
disruptive and will change the skills requirement in the
datacentre. To some degree we will do away with database
administrators.
"Staff costs can account for 53% of datacentre costs and 80% of
staff time is spent maintaining existing IT systems. IBM's goal is
to make the datacentre self-managing. We will end up with a
different set of skills," he said.
Given the lack of standards and the disruptive nature of the
technology, the big question is whether the industry can truly make
self-healing and self-managed IT systems work.
David Roberts, chief executive officer at Corporate IT Forum Tif,
said, "The notion of an electronic software hospital is an
extremely challenging idea.
"Self-healing represents a public acknowledgement that software
companies have been unable to resolve quality issues in their
products. I would prefer the industry to concentrate on quality,
rather than self-healing technology, to fix errors in poorly
written code."
For more information on self-healing
software
www.managementsoftware.hp.com
www.sun.com/software/solutions/n1/
www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/default.mspx
http://www-3.ibm.com/autonomic/index.shtml
An overview of self-healing software
High-end systems are becoming so complex that it can cost 10
times the amount spent on the system to manage it, not including
the amount lost through downtime.
Self-healing software monitors IT systems and automatically
performs tasks otherwise done manually, such as re-allocating
resources and determining when memory upgrades are needed.
This can be attractive for IT directors, as staff numbers can be
reduced and existing staff can be redirected to other areas.
Employees' working hours can be reduced, as can time spent on the
helpdesk.
However, there may be a change to the skill set of IT staff such
as database administrators, should standards in self-healing
software become unified and it is embraced by the industry.