Autonomic Computing is not Pixie Dust

David Schatsky | June 27, 2003, 08:13 AM

Live at IBM's On Demand Business Transformation Update. Dr. David Cohn, from IBM's research division, looks at the application of autonomics to business processes. An early application of their autonomic thinking is to Internet denial of service (DOS) attacks. IBM started to think about automatically sensing and responding to such attacks, by automatically reconfiguring and provisining network infrastructure. Current thinking, though, is that a more effective approach is to provide intelligent decision support information to human operators, who would then manually respond to a DOS attack.

Is this a lowering of expectations of the promise of autonomic computing? No solid answer from IBM, other than they'll "continue to use the technology"--like systems management toos--they have developed over the years.

Autonomic computing is not pixie dust. (TM)