IBM delivers autonomic tools | CNET News.com
IBM's push to create systems that can manage themselves is moving from the drawing board to the commercial development community.
The company plans to release on Monday an open-source toolkit that will let programmers build autonomic, or self-managing, capabilities into their own applications. The Autonomic Computing Toolkit will be offered at IBM's DeveloperWorks Web site as a free add-on to the Eclipse Development Environment. IBM expects that software companies as well as corporate developers will use the tools.
Previously, Big Blue has used AlphaWorks, its site for prototype software, as the venue for the release of code arising from its research into autonomic computing. The shift to the DeveloperWorks site indicates that the software is fully tested and supported by IBM, said David Bartlett, the company's director of autonomic computing. He said IBM may decide to charge for the software.
IBM's autonomic computing initiative, launched in 2001, aims to create hardware and software that have the "intelligence" to monitor and manage themselves as part of a distributed computing system. It reduces the cost and complexity of operating computers by cutting back on the need for human administrators.
The overall goal is to let systems resolve problems automatically. Last year, Big Blue issued a blueprint describing the different aspects of its autonomic computing vision.