Forty some odd years ago, the U.S. brought together its best scientists with
a goal straight out of science fiction. They intended to put a man on the
moon. IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM) Friday set out on its own moonshot: the creation of
self-managing servers.
The initiative is Project eLiza, and Big Blue said it will devote billions
of dollars — 25 percent of its research and development budget for
servers — to the project, as well as five of its highest profile labs —
including Haifa, Israel and Boeblingen, Germany — and hundreds of its top
scientists.
“The ultimate goal of eLiza is to eliminate most, if not all human
interaction with business computers and make global computing networks as
easy to manage as today’s kitchen appliances,” IBM said.
“Our vision of the future and interconnectivity is a billion people
interacting with a million e-businesses via a trillion interconnected
intelligent devices,” said Dr. Tom Bradicich, chief technology officer of
the IBM eServer Group.
There’s only one hitch in that vision. According to the U.S. Department of
Commerce, in five years there will be a shortage of at least one million IT
administrators. The future may hold hundreds of millions of people connected
via wireless and other devices to the Web, driving trillions of
transactions, but who will be maintaining the systems? Who will fix the
servers when they inevitably go down?
Enter Big Blue’s Project eLiza.
“We are responding to that and preparing for that with Project eLiza,”
Bradicich said. “We’re moving into an era when computers are going to need
less and less, and in some cases no, support from a human caregiver.”
Under Project eLiza, Big Blue plans to unveil servers — from the high
volume Intel-based xSeries all the way across the board to the
top-of-the-line zSeries — with the ability to “heal” themselves by
activating built-in redundant systems when failures occur, the ability to
protect themselves with super-vigilant security technology, and the ability
to configure themselves by installing operating systems and data
automatically. As a step in this direction, Bradicich said its Intel-based
servers will be hot-swappable by the end of the year.
“(In the future) even if you have the money to pay the IT professionals,
they may not exist,” Bradicich said. “Having computer systems that have the
self-healing, self-protection and self-provisioning capabilities will be
essential in many cases.”
Some Project eLiza technology is already in place, including the Chipkill
memory technology which can recover a chip memory failure, and Intelligent
Resource Director, a server management environment that automatically
allocates system resources for multiple jobs, according to demand. Software
Rejuvenator, a part of IBM’s current management suite which can predict
system lock ups and take evasive action.
More of the technologies are slated for release this year, including eServer
clustering — which updates software and manages workloads across massive
clusters with a single operation — and self-healing technologies, like
Chipkill, intended to enable server components to function for decades
without failing.
Further down the pipeline are subsets of eLiza like Project Oceano, a
working prototype of a server farm that manages itself. It brings machines
on line or off line to meet changing demand. It installs operating systems
and data, and it diagnoses problems and takes corrective measures. IBM said
it does all these things — without human intervention.
And in several years, IBM plans to unveil Blue Gene, the world’s first
supercomputer with the ability to heal itself.
While the company has undertaken this project with the coming IT
administrator shortage in mind, it also recognizes that even if Project
eLiza is successful in its goals, there will be times when an IT worker will
have to service the machines. Therefore, according to Bradicich, the company
is also working on remote management capabilities that will allow workers to
manage the system from a computer or even a PDA.
“Not only are we trying to do it automatically, but the things that cannot
be done automatically, we’re removing the time and place dependencies,”
Bradicich said.
“I think its a vision,” said Jonathan Eunice, an analyst with the Illuminata
Group. “You can’t expect that you’re going to get the full shebang in one
year or three years or even five years. It’s a long-term project. Once you
understand that, I think it’s pretty exciting.”
Not only is it exciting, but it may very well set a new course, a renewed
focus on quality and reliability, for the entire server industry, according
to Eunice.
“I think you’re going to see widespread imitation of it or widespread
reaction to it,” he said. “(Others in the space) are going to have to step
up too as a result of IBM kind of lighting a fire under the issue.
“It’s not going to be unique. The vision of having no management overhead,
everyone’s got that vision. If a company like IBM starts down this path, you
can be sure that other companies will, one, seek to license it, or two,
imitate it.”
But Eunice also pointed out that while many will seek to do the same things,
IBM will have a significant advantage due to the size of the investment in
the project and the intellectual property it will bring to bear.
“IBM’s back as a top-flight competitor,” he said. “It’s totally changed the
market dynamics. It’s not good news for Compaq, it’s not good news for HP.
It’s really become an IBM versus Sun (Microsystems) show.”
