|
ARMONK, New York (February 16, 2004) – IBM today announced the availability of an Eclipse-based Autonomic Computing Toolkit for developing self-managing capability in IT environments. The toolkit will be the first integrated collection of assets and tools, with support provided, to assist software developers in designing and testing autonomic solutions.
The Autonomic Computing Toolkit will help developers integrate autonomic computing capabilities into their applications. The toolkit is built to work with the IBM Software Development Platform, a comprehensive set of tools and shared set of proven best practices to build, integrate, extend, modernize and deploy applications in an on demand world.
“IBM is committed to establishing and supporting standards for autonomic computing in the industry,” said Alan Ganek, vice president, autonomic computing at IBM. “Eclipse is emerging as a common development framework for companies who want to ‘jump start’ the creation of autonomic solutions within their enterprise.”
The toolkit contains embeddable components, tools, usage scenarios and documentation consistent with IBM's autonomic computing reference architecture, first outlined in the Autonomic Computing Blueprint published by IBM in April 2003.
Leading companies participated in the successful beta run of the toolkit, including Hitachi Software Engineering Co., Ltd (HSE), InstallShield Software, NetFuel Inc., NS Solutions Corporation, Opalis Software, Singlestep Technologies, Toshiba Solutions and Zero G Software, Inc.
“One of the most important goals for creating mission critical IT systems is to minimize meantime to repair in an unexpected system failure, maximizing meantime to failure at the same time,” said Atsushi Kihira, department manager, Internet Business department at Hitachi Software Engineering. “At Hitachi Software Engineering, we incorporated autonomic computing technologies into our Web system development tool, Assam anyWarp, and our e-commerce solution for retail industries, j-Retail@Solution, which has reduced meantime to repair among multiple e-commerce vendors, thus helping improve our customers’ satisfaction. As a software vendor, I believe that it is HSE’s task to support autonomic computing technologies by providing more concrete product plans and address potential customer needs.”
"In today's heterogeneous IT environment, systems management has become increasingly complex," said Takashi Oshiro, director at NS Solutions. "Adopting autonomic computing technologies into our IT infrastructure, which includes IBM, Sun Microsystems and Oracle components, facilitates availability improvements. I believe it will not only differentiate our technical support skills and experience, but it will also accelerate standards efforts under way.”
The Autonomic Computing Toolkit contains components for four core autonomic technology areas:
The Autonomic Management Engine (AME) monitors events, analyzes them, then plans and executes corrective action on a computing resource. When integrated with the other toolkit technologies, the AME is the facilitator of an autonomic self-management system.
The Integrated Solutions Console provides a web-based infrastructure based on industry-standard technologies to address the need for common system administration in a customer's IT environment such as setup, configuration, run-time monitoring and control, with a consistent look and feel. Tools provided include a run-time environment, documentation on developing components, Javadoc for Integrated Solutions Console and related APIs, and sample components.
Solution Installation and deployment technologies, a core component of IBM's self-configuring autonomic capability, will enable enterprises and independent software vendors to identify, validate and act upon software interdependencies and prerequisites across the totality of their infrastructures, and will reduce installation and configuration failures. The set of technologies delivered include a consistent way to describe the solution and dependency information in an XML format that can be used as part of the install and post-install process and a set of run-time libraries that includes a dependency manager and support for populating the inventory of hardware and software into a common repository.
Problem Determination autonomic technologies and standards are part of IBM’s development of self-healing capabilities, laying the foundation for systems and networks to detect, analyze, correlate, and resolve IT problems and automatically diagnose the root cause of problems in complex environments. Included in the toolkit are:
The Common Base Event format, previously submitted by IBM to the OASIS standards body, is envisioned as the basis for standardized exchange of problem determination data.
The Generic Log Adapter for Autonomic Computing, a tool to convert existing log files to the Common Base Event format. This component helps software developers adapt their applications to the format without the need to re-write the applications.
The Log and Trace Analyzer for Autonomic Computing, a tool which supports reading logs in the Common Base Event format, correlating the logs based on different criteria and viewing the correlated log records -- enabling faster root cause analysis and problem determination in the end-to-end heterogeneous environment.
The toolkit will also include documentation such as online tutorials, user guides and developer guides. Supported platforms for the toolkit are IBM AIX, Linux on Intel systems and Windows2000.
This is the first release of the toolkit, with expected releases containing new features and functionality planned throughout the year. Developers can access the toolkit, as well as additional information about autonomic computing, on ibm.com/autonomic.
IBM is also expanding its resources for developers with a new Autonomic Computing collection on its developer site at ibm.com/developerWorks/autonomic. This collection of resources will be updated on a weekly basis, and will feature tools, tutorials, articles, forums and how-to's on creating autonomic computing applications to transform businesses into on demand environments.
About developerWorks
developerWorks is IBM’s resource for developers offering a range of tools, code and education that enable developers to take full advantage of the IBM Software Development Platform in an on demand world. By providing relevant and accurate technical information, developerWorks content presents valuable development choices for building and deploying applications across heterogeneous systems. developerWorks covers technical information on Rational, WebSphere, DB2, Tivoli and Lotus as well as open standards technology including Java, Linux, XML, Web services, Wireless, emerging technologies and more.
About IBM Autonomic Computing
IBM has developed a broad range of autonomic computing capabilities that are being integrated across the entire computing environment. IBM Autonomic Computing is responsible for working with the company’s product development teams, IBM Global Services and IBM Research to expedite autonomic technologies and products to the marketplace. It also works with standards organizations, business partners, customers and industry leaders to help make the best use, and drive rapid deployment, of these capabilities. More information on IBM Autonomic Computing, including the latest news, events and whitepapers, can be found on ibm.com/autonomic.
About IBM
IBM is the world’s largest information technology company, with 80 years of leadership in helping businesses innovate. IBM works with companies of all sizes around the world to deploy a full range of IBM technologies. For more information about IBM, visit www.ibm.com.
|
