IBM, Fujitsu set out to establish open APIs for autonomic computing

By Alun Williams

Posted on 1 Dec 2004 at 12:03

IBM and Fujitsu are undertaking joint research on so-called autonomic computing. The focus of the development is to clearly define a set of APIs for industry vendors in this developing area of enterprise computing.

In order to gain wider industry support, the companies have declared that the results of their research will result in 'open standards' available to the whole of the IT industry.

The eventual aim of 'autonomic computing' is for large systems to become more self-managing so they can automatically anticipate, diagnose and correct problems and optimise the processing of varying workloads. The bottom line, of course, is to reduce the need for manual intervention and reduce IT maintenance costs.

Specified areas for collaboration include the definition of management capabilities, the handling of installations and deployments, and the extension of the Web Services Distributed Management (WSDM) Event Format, which has been submitted to the OASIS standards body.

'Autonomic computing standards are key to enabling the interoperability of multiple vendors' products in heterogeneous IT environments,' said Yoshiyuki Tanakura, corporate vice president, Fujitsu Limited, 'and we are pleased to join with IBM in advancing this important effort.

'Open standards are an essential ingredient for building autonomic systems,' said Alan Ganek, vice president, Autonomic Computing, IBM. 'We are delighted to collaborate with Fujitsu to lay the foundation for self-managing solutions that will help customers respond more quickly in an on demand business.'