IBM announced the creation of its Autonomic Computing unit on Monday, which the company says will work to create self-managed software and hardware for enterprises to reduce the complexity of their IT infrastructure.
IBM plans to release a series of offerings that will help companies build more automated IT infrastructures in an effort to reduce costs, improve uptime and make efficient use of support skills, according to Miles Barel, Hawthorne, N.Y.-based program director for autonomic computing for IBM. All software and hardware with autonomic capabilities will be available to IBM customers around the world including those in Canada, he added.
“By providing the ability to implement new capabilities faster, companies can tackle that backlog and use these new capabilities for competitive advantage,” he said. “You want to free the IT department, so rather than spending all of their time managing what is already in place, you want to free them up to be able to work on strategic issues that can help the business be more competitive, and recognize new sources of revenue that can be enabled by e-business.”
IBM plans on creating a set of worldwide autonomic computing centres to assist enterprises develop and test autonomic technologies.
Several IBM product lines already possess autonomic capabilities including the company’s WebSphere Application Server Version 5.0, DB2 database, Enterprise Storage Server and its PCs. IBM has announced 26 offerings with autonomic capabilities in the area of systems management, including new identity and storage resource management software.
WebSphere application server will now include features that will enable it to automatically monitor, analyze and fix performance problems.
Also, it has enhanced the DB2 database with self-managing and self-tuning features to simplify the tasks of maintaining a database. DB2 version 8 will be generally available on Nov. 21.
IBM plans a future announcement on enhancements to the Shark enterprise storage server, allowing companies to more easily configure their systems and manage their information.
IBM PCs will be installed with capability to guard against data loss and hard drive failure. The feature, called Client Rescue and Recovery and Distributed Wireless Security Auditor will be available by the end of next year.
IBM Canada in Markham, Ont. can be found at http://www.ibm.ca.
