Nasa is approaching autonomic computing with great
interest but sees large challenges and potential costs with the
emerging technology, one of its IT officials claims.
"I am extremely thrilled by the prospect of autonomic computing
and I think it is, in many ways, a breakthrough technology," said
Peter Hughes, assistant chief for technology at the IT division of
Nasa's Goddard Space Flight Centre. "But I think there are going to
be significant challenges."
Among those challenges is the development of scalable systems
that can handle cascading problems affecting multiple systems.
Developing diagnostics that can deal with multiple systems will
also be a major issue, he added.
"We've encountered huge challenges in validating and testing
some of these technologies, and it ended up taking a lot more time
and being a lot more costly than we ever imagined," said
Hughes.
Autonomic computing builds upon existing technology, with the
goal of developing management capabilities that can be applied to
legacy systems.
Suppliers are already delivering bits of the autonomic approach
with self-management and self-optimising systems management tools.
But systems that can manage an enterprise, leaving IT managers free
to focus on high-level issues instead of mundane and thorny system
configuration issues, could still be years away.
The autonomic approach was outlined in 2001 by IBM, and is based
on the belief that the increasing complexity of systems is too big
a burden on businesses and governments.
"Nobody can understand all the pieces and parts as they come
together," said IBM vice-president Alan Ganek.
This complexity is making the job of running a corporate
datacentre, he added, as datacentre staff spend increasing amounts
of time fixing problems, and 40% of system outages are caused by
operator error, he said.
US government agencies, for example, have been moving from
proprietary to commercial off-the-shelf systems to try to
standardise and reduce their IT costs. But seemingly simpler
solutions can bring new and difficult problems, a point Hughes
alluded to when describing the difficulty Nasa has had trying to
synchronise an upgrade of its commercial systems.
"Often we displace some simple solution with more complex ones
and are not looking at how much it will cost to maintain that
system and keep it operating," said Hughes.
Software bugs are another issue.
"Software engineers have long recognised that you're never going
to get out that last bug in the lab - you have to eventually put
something in the field," said Kaiser. "But you shouldn't stop
testing it then, and you should figure on continuing to patch,
repair it and reconfigure it."
Patrick Thibodeau writes for Computerworld