Getting Control of the Infrastructure: Atonomic, WSDM, DSI, SDM, etc.

In my previous post I talked to the problem of the complex infrastructure.

Is there anything going on in the industry to try and resolve these issues.

One of the first things that should be evidently clear is that this issue isn’t an issue for a single company and thankfully a number of companies are working together to resolve the issues (Microsoft, IBM, HP).

As with most technologies that are early in their development cycle many names are being used and there is no clear taxonomy yet. Most people seem to recognise the title of ‘Autonomic’ which was originally conceived by IBM (I think) but each vendor has their own initiative but are coming together under the ‘WS-DM’ banner also. The problem with the ‘Autonomic’ word is that is has another perfectly good use in biology. I’m not sure that WS-DM help either, as it links the issue to Web Services which is a bit limiting when the major elements are infrastructure and infrastructure does lots of things which aren’t really Web Services.

The basic concept is that a service and all of its elements can be described starting with the business requirements and working down into technical requirements, Microsoft call this the Service Definition Model. Each of the service elements are then told to follow the document, if the document updates they update, likewise changes made to the elements are assessed against the document and can only be applied if they don’t have an impact, they then update the document.

The technology has a long way to go, but the concept seems to work.

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One of the questions that CFO did ask, one of the few repeatable ones, was this:

“What changed to cause the problem, it was working fine so it must have been caused by a change”.

It’s one of those questions that cuts through to the issue, “who knows” is the real response. There are lots of changes going on all the time, patches, fixes, configuration. If someone did change something how were they supposed to know it was impacting upon a service that was using the element of the infrastructure that they were changing.

Until we can answer this question categorically and precisely, and preferably with the answer “nothing that’s had an impact”, we haven’t finished.

Tags: Autonomic, DSI, WSDM, SDM, Service Management