IBM's eLiza: Self-healing IT

With eLiza, IBM is also including its software with new features, particularly with respect to Tivoli management applications. For example, Tivoli's SecureWay Risk Manager, will let IT integrate and manage information from a variety of security technologies, including intrusion detection systems and firewalls. The Tivoli SecureWay Policy Director and Tivoli Identity Director will work together to increase security levels across the enterprise. The former will let you create and implement a security policy for your entire enterprise, while the latter will let you control access to systems, applications, and data in a centralized and automated fashion. These self-protecting capabilities reduce the amount of administration needed to manage security throughout the enterprise. IBM expects to add more eLiza capabilities to Tivoli and its other middleware, including MQSeries and WebSphere, in the near future. IBM is also adding elements of eLiza to its service offerings. For example, a portion of its e-business Management Services now includes Workload Process Performance, which lets businesses set priorities for resource allocation to more efficiently process transactions. Finally, IBM has added eLiza functions to its Virtual Help Desk service, which now can automatically perform diagnostics to fix software problems in a self-healing manner. IBM will continue to add more eLiza functions to its other services in the near future. Not new, just broader in scope Certainly, self-managing technologies are not a new idea. Portions of the Oracle 9i database are self-managing; for example, the application can manage its own database workloads. Likewise, Sun Microsystems' Jini technology can be used to make devices self-managing. However, IBM's ideas about self-management in the eLiza project are much broader in scope than the implementations of Oracle, Sun Microsystems, and others. By tackling the enterprise technology infrastructure as a whole, IBM hopes to make self-management a standard part of hardware, software, and services across the industry in the future - which could ultimately mean a sizeable TCO reduction for enterprises. Such a reduction could be possible within two to five years, if IBM delivers on eLiza and convinces the rest of the industry to adopt it. Do you think self-managing servers would benefit your network? Talk back below or e-mail us with your thoughts. Maggie Biggs is a software developer who has managed several enterprise IT infrastructures during her more than 15 years of business and technology experience.

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