From a Nov. 29 address by Irving Wladawsky-Berger, IBM Server Group Vice President of Technology and Strategy, to Kennedy Information's Consulting Summit 3.0 in New York:
Usually you get a feel for the value of a major technology when it not only fulfills its own promise, but it becomes a major enabler of other key strategies that you've been trying to implement, perhaps for years.
That's happening with Grid computing. And let me talk about two such major strategies and their relations to Grid computing and the value they each bring to Grid computing.
The first is a strategy that we actually conceived this year called Autonomic Computing - the effort to bring about a world of self-managing systems and a self-managing infrastructure.
Let me digress a little bit to explain why we have to do this. The answer is not very complicated. If you look at Moore's Law and all this technology coming out, you can quickly convince yourself that while the technology is wonderful, it is the cost and complexity of managing all this technology that will eventually do everybody in.
Therefore, if in addition to inventing technology, you want to figure out how to make it valuable to the marketplace, you need to address head-on the issue of managing that technology at a reasonable price.
"Technology Needs To Manage Itself"
And when I say technology, I'm including all of the software, all of the applications, all of the storage, all of the pieces of the infrastructure.
There is only one answer: The technology needs to manage itself. Now, I don't mean any far-out AI project; what I mean is that we need to develop the right software, the right architecture, the right mechanisms ... so that instead of the technology behaving in its usual pedantic way and requiring a human being to do everything for it, it starts behaving more like the "intelligent" computer that we all expect it to be, and starts taking care of its own needs.
If it doesn't feel well, it does something. If somebody's attacking it, the system recognizes it and deals with the attack. If it needs more computing power, it just goes and gets it, and doesn't keep looking for human beings to step in.
We call this Autonomic Computing because of the analogy to the autonomic nervous system, which is at the heart of all organisms, including humans, and the purpose of which is to keep us alive.
It's what we usually call the primitive functions of our organism. Primitive but critical, because you'll die unless they keep you breathing and regulate your temperature and do all kinds of things that are needed so that you can concentrate on higher functions, like giving this talk, and not worry about breathing, controlling your temperature and other little, but vital, things like that.
And we are organizing our activities in Autonomic Computing around four key areas: self-optimization, self-configuration, self-healing and self-protecting. There's quite a bit of this that we have already in our individual systems. And that's good. But in talking to our customers they said, "You know, Irving, it's really good for you to come and tell me how great, let's say, your zSeries mainframes are because of their autonomic capabilities; what I really need is the whole end-to-end infrastructure to manage itself." It doesn't do any good to have a superb server if everything in between is very chaotic.
So we realize we have to extend autonomic capabilities across the Internet. And to do that, you need a set of open protocols that allow all of the various systems around the Internet that are participating in this autonomic initiative to be able to collaborate and share information, identify denial of service attacks, identify any failures ... and start routing things around.
This is where Grid computing comes in, because it's the open protocols of the Grid running on every single system that enable "intelligent" management capabilities to cut across different systems. Using these Grid protocols, we can realize this vision of creating, over time, an increasingly self-managing infrastructure.
And this is clearly one of the most important areas that we need to address. It's at least as demanding and critical as creating the telephone infrastructure of the nation. And that could not have been accomplished without moving from manual operators connecting each call to the automated switching system that finally allowed people to connect without operators. This is a very similar kind of project, a little bit more complicated but with similar kinds of objectives.
The last major aspect of Grid computing I want to talk about is its impact on the world of "utility" computing.
We've been talking in the industry for a while about computing-on-demand, storage-on-demand, applications-on-demand, and the notion of application service providers.
"Lack of Standards"
A lot of progress has been made. And we in IBM have had quite a number of engagements. I could talk about work we are doing with Dow Chemical and Saks in procurement and others that have adopted this notion of outsourcing individual business processes.
But the reality is that there is a long way to go, that this world of outsourcing IT and creating IT utilities has been way too difficult.
The reason it has been too difficult is a lack of standards for connecting the computing resources and applications that you're outsourcing.
When you don't have standards, every engagement is a complicated, discrete, expensive and time-consuming manual effort. But when you have standards - such as we have for, let's say, outsourcing Web sites - everything happens much faster.
Well, once this vision of Grid computing, based on open standards, starts to play out and enables an enterprise to link together its various computing resources and applications over their networks ... it is a small step to then link to computing resources and applications that don't happen to be owned by you, that happen to be part of a utility.
So once you have those open protocols, you get the kind of deployment flexibility that we are after. And I believe this will absolutely open up the whole on-demand world - the world of computing utilities.
It will be just so much easier for people to make decisions on what processes and applications are core to the business and should be kept in-house, while having pretty much everything else done by a vendor. And if that provider doesn't do a good job, since it's all based on standards, it's an easy matter to switch to somebody else.
So, to summarize, there is an incredible amount of potential in this technology of Grid computing.
I feel a little bit as if I could have been addressing you in 1994 or 1995. It's as if back then I were saying, "You know, there is this thing called the Internet that the research world has been making a lot of progress with. And they are doing incredible things with it. I'm not sure exactly what its impact will be, but boy, this feels like a really big deal."
I think the feeling now is similar, that the Grid is opening up a whole set of really important capabilities we have all been after for a long while. And now of course starts the hard work, and it's the work that all of you do so well, which is to take these technologies and translate them into real business value.
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