IBM Releases Autonomic Software to Open Source

IBM on June 14 said that it has released software to the Apache Open Source Foundation designed to help automate the detection and remediation application or transaction problems in the data center.

The software, implemented at IBM as a part of both its autonomic computing initiative and contribution to the Web Services Distributed Management standard, provides "a framework for building WSDM interfaces into peoples devices—applications, servers or storage," said Scott Handy, worldwide vice president of Linux and open source for IBM in Somers, N.Y.

Third-party management application providers can use the framework to build system management tools that adhere to the WSDM (Web Services Distributed Management) interface.

IBM believes that by making its framework available to the open-source community, it can help other vendors that are trying to implement WSDM be "far more productive," said Handy.

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IBMs aim is also to help spur adoption of the WSDM standard, which is being developed by the Distributed Management Task Force and was approved last year by the OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards) standards body.

In work on the standard being conducted by DMTF members, many organizations were doing development in parallel, duplicating effort in separate projects.

IBM believed that its implementation of the framework was solid enough to release to the open-source community, where work on the standard could accelerate.

"Were sharing the same code base and we can all innovate a lot faster," said Handy.

To read about IBMs latest autonomic computing tools, click here.

The framework provides a standard set of interfaces for IBMs common base event format, which describes how to define an event in a way that other applications can use the information about whats occurring to isolate the root cause, analyze and take steps to fix it.

IBM chose the Apache Open Source Foundation because of its successful track record.

The Apache Web Server has almost 78 percent of the Web server market, which makes it even more successful than Linux, which has 25 percent of the server market, according to Handy.

The framework code is available as part of the open-source Apache Muse Project, where developers collaborate on ideas and improvements to the code.

The ultimate goal of the software initiative is to help reduce the cost and complexity of managing data centers with hundreds of virtual servers.

Other vendors backing the WSDM standard include CA, BMC Software, Tibco, Siebel, Hitachi, Fujitsu, Cisco Systems and Amberpoint Software.

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