Are self-healing computers the next big thing?

7.00pm - By PETER GRIFFIN

There's a major movement afoot in the world of computing and it's all about giving computers a mind of their own - sort of.

While not a new concept, autonomic computing, the science of building computers that to some degree can heal themselves in the event of hardware or software failure, is starting to see the commercial light of day.

Like the body regulates heart rate, breathing and body temperature, vendors like IBM, Microsoft, Hewlett Packard and Sun are now pouring R&D dollars into developing systems that allow complex server clusters and computer networks to look after themselves. This would allow them to fix faults that would usually require the input of a tech support team or at the worst, expensive external IT contractors.

Katrina Troughton, general manager of software for Australia and New Zealand and a Kiwi to boot, says the early stages of autonomic computing is being integrated across the IBM product line from the Tivoli storage products to the Websphere and DB2 product families.

"Customers keep saying to us they want return on investment. Their systems are becoming so complex, we want to give them more tools to manage their IT environment - systems that configure settings by themselves."

While autonomic computing may summons up images of HAL-like meltdowns the early stages of autonomic computing aim at a much simpler level of consciousness.

Troughton says simple problems can be dealt with independent of human hands, saving companies time and money.

"If a computer runs out of disk space or memory it can switch to a backup system by itself.

"All of this is software based. Make the systems easier to install, without the need to run extra hardware, because that just increases the cost of ownership," she says.

Big Blue is taking autonomic computing seriously forming a business unit devoted to the science and is understood to have earmarked a good portion of its US$5.3 million annual R&D budget forv autonomic-related research.

Other server vendors are following suit with their own initiatives. IBM's vision for autonomic computing is mapped out in its Autonomic Computing Manifesto, a document that describes an open-standards based system that undertakes its own repairs, shifts workloads among servers, fends off virus and hacker attacks and pre-empts information needs.

Middleware embedded in the system forms the backbone of the autnomic functions.

While autonomic computing raises the prospect of IT support staff being put out of business, Throughton says the initiative could be the cure of the IT skills shortages facing some sectors.

"There's still a big skills issue among our customers, making sure people know the right course of action to take. This takes a lot of those functions out of their hands."

www.research.ibm.com/autonomic