IBM, Cisco look to help networks help themselves

IDG News Service - IBM and Cisco Systems Inc. plan to work together to find ways to make it easier to diagnose and solve problems in an enterprise's IT infrastructure, even to the point where it can do that by itself.
Pinpointing the causes of failures and solving the root problems take up a lot of IT staff time, a resource that has become more scarce as budgets tighten, according to the two companies, which announced a joint drive toward self-diagnostic and self-healing networks today. The combination of networks and systems is also becoming more complex, so simplifying and automating that process is increasingly important, they said.
Self-diagnosis and self-healing are key parts of IBM's broader autonomic computing initiative, aimed at creating systems and networks that in many respects run themselves, said Ric Telford, director of architecture and technology in the autonomic computing business at IBM. Companies can never remove the human administrator from the picture completely, but Cisco and IBM's steps should make life easier even when people have to get involved.
For example, if a transaction goes wrong, the cause might lie in any one of many applications or devices that come into play across an infrastructure, Telford said. Narrowing it down can be hard.
"The growing complexity of infrastructure is causing more and more of these hard-to-diagnose problems," he said.
Initial goals of IBM and Cisco's program include coming up with a common way for parts of a system to log events and providing software for an administrator to see and analyze problems. The two companies plan to offer these and other technologies over time, but they are also making the technology available openly to other players and hope to have it adopted by industry standards bodies, Telford said.
Between technical and political disagreements, it's unlikely that all vendors will sign on to the approach, but coordination among just some of a company's systems should save IT departments time and money, said Amy Wohl, an industry analyst at Wohl Associates in Narberth, Pa. "It's unrealistic to think that anything new is going to cover every single thing," Wohl said.
The IBM-developed Common Base Event (CBE) specification defines a standard format for event logs, which devices and software use to keep track of transactions and other activity.
All the components of systems typically have different formats for the information they collect about events, Telford said. For example, if an IT team needs to figure out where something went wrong with an e-business application, they may need to understand 40 different event log