IBM And Cisco Tell IT Systems To Heal Thyself

"IBM and Cisco are working on a set of proposed technologies and standards creating a common language to detect, log and resolve system problems," the companies said in a statement.

In the first phase of the joint project, IBM pledged to integrate new autonomic technologies across its platforms of software, storage and server hardware products. In the second phase, Cisco plans to integrate the technologies into its line of hardware and software. IBM said it is beginning its integration "immediately."

Citing the difficulties presented by the massive infrastructure of today's IT environments, the firms pointed to the problems created, for instance, in data centers by the multiplicity of products often marked by diverse and proprietary instrumentation.

"As system and network complexity in IT Infrastructures has grown it has become increasingly apparent that this trend cannot continue without some major change in the way the infrastructures are managed," said IBM's Alan Ganek, vice president of the firm's Automatic Computing operation. The companies indicated the new push toward developing "self-healing" systems is a continuation of their commitment to drive and develop open standards.

IBM's campaigning on the issue became more visible in April when it revealed its autonomic computing blueprint. The idea behind the strategy is to use open standards to assist in the development of self-managing systems that gather information from the system at hand, and then make necessary decisions.

This story courtesy of TechWeb .