Showing papers in "Ibm Systems Journal in 2003"

The new dynamics of strategy: Sense-making in a complex and complicated world

Abstract: In this paper, we challenge the universality of three basic assumptions prevalent in organizational decision support and strategy: assumptions of order, of rational choice, and of intent. We describe the Cynefin framework, a sense-making device we have developed to help people make sense of the complexities made visible by the relaxation of these assumptions. The Cynefin framework is derived from several years of action research into the use of narrative and complexity theory in organizational knowledge exchange, decision-making, strategy, and policy-making. The framework is explained, its conceptual underpinnings are outlined, and its use in group sense-making and discourse is described. Finally, the consequences of relaxing the three basic assumptions, using the Cynefin framework as a mechanism, are considered.

The dawning of the autonomic computing era

Abstract: This issue of the IBM Systems Journal explores a broad set of ideas and approaches to autonomic computing--some first steps in what we see as a journey to create more self-managing computing systems Autonomic computing represents a collection and integration of technologies that enable the creation of an information technology computing infrastructure for IBM's agenda for the next era of computing--e-business on demand This paper presents an overview of IBM's autonomic computing initiative It examines the genesis of autonomic computing, the industry and marketplace drivers, the fundamental characteristics of autonomic systems, a framework for how systems will evolve to become more self-managing, and the key role for open industry standards needed to support autonomic behavior in heterogeneous system environments Technologies explored in each of the papers presented in this issue are introduced for the reader

Business artifacts: An approach to operational specification

Abstract: Any business, no matter what physical goods or services it produces, relies on business records. It needs to record details of what it produces in terms of concrete information. Business artifacts are a mechanism to record this information in units that are concrete, identifiable, self-describing, and indivisible. We developed the concept of artifacts, or semantic objects, in the context of a technique for constructing formal yet intuitive operational descriptions of a business. This technique, called OpS (Operational Specification), was developed over the course of many business-transformation and business-process-integration engagements for use in IBM's internal processes as well as for use with customers. Business artifacts (or business records) are the basis for the factorization of knowledge that enables the OpS technique. In this paper we present a comprehensive discussion of business artifacts--what they are, how they are represented, and the role they play in operational business modeling. Unlike the more familiar and popular concept of business objects, business artifacts are pure instances rather than instances of a taxonomy of types. Consequently, the key operation on business artifacts is recognition rather than classification.

IBM Storage Tank-- A heterogeneous scalable SAN file system

Abstract: As the amount of data being stored in the open systems environment continues to grow, new paradigms for the attachment and management of data and the underlying storage of the data are emerging One of the emerging technologies in this area is the storage area network (SAN) Using a SAN to connect large amounts of storage to large numbers of computers gives us the potential for new approaches to accessing, sharing, and managing our data and storage However, existing operating systems and file systems are not built to exploit these new capabilities IBM Storage Tankâ?¢ is a SAN-based distributed file system and storage management solution that enables many of the promises of SANs, including shared heterogeneous file access, centralized management, and enterprise-wide scalability In addition, Storage Tank borrows policy-based storage and data management concepts from mainframe computers and makes them available in the open systems environment This paper explores the goals of the Storage Tank project, the architecture used to achieve these goals, and the current and future plans for the technology

Affect and machine design: Lessons for the development of autonomous machines

Abstract: Human beings have evolved a rich and sophisticated set of processes for engaging with the world in which cognition and affect play two different but equally crucial roles. Cognition interprets and makes sense of the world. Affect evaluates and judges, modulating the operating parameters of cognition and giving a warning about possible dangers. The study of how these two systems work together provides guidance for the design of complex autonomous systems that must deal with a variety of tasks in a dynamic, often unpredictable, and sometimes hazardous environment.

Experimental games for the design of reputation management systems

Abstract: Trust between people engaging in economic transactions affects the economic growth of their community. Reputation management systems, such as the Feedback Forum of eBay Inc., can increase the trust level of the participants. We show in this paper that experimental economics can be used in a controlled laboratory environment to measure trust and trust enhancement. Specifically, we present an experimental study that quantifies the increase in trust produced by two versions of a reputation management system. We also discuss some emerging issues in the design of reputation management systems.

No wires attached: Usability challenges in the connected mobile world

Abstract: Mobile computing platforms combining small, lightweight, low-power devices with wireless network connectivity enable the performance of familiar tasks in new environments and create opportunities for novel interactions. Since mobility imposes significant cognitive and ergonomic constraints affecting device and application usability, ease of use is central to devices in the fully mobile wirelessly connected (FMWC) world. In this paper, we consider mobility as an attribute both of the computer and the user. We explain the differences between transportable and fully mobile devices, and we contrast applications that are essentially FMWC applications, those that can be adapted to the FMWC context, and those that are unsuitable for it. We discuss the unique challenges to usability for mobile users and devices and their interaction, and we point out the increasingly critical role of usability in the mobile environment.

Technological impact of magnetic hard disk drives on storage systems

Abstract: Magnetic hard disk drives have undergone vast technological improvements since their introduction as storage devices over 45 years ago, and these improvements have had a marked influence on how disk drives are applied and what they can do. Areal density increases have exceeded the traditional semiconductor development trajectory and have yielded higher-capacity, higher-performance, and smaller-form-factor disk drives, enabling desktop and mobile computers to store multi-gigabytes of data easily. Server systems containing large numbers of drives have achieved unparalleled reliability, performance, and storage capacity. All of these characteristics have been achieved at rapidly declining disk costs. This paper relates advances in disk drives to corresponding trends in storage systems and projects where these trends may lead in the future.

Security in an autonomic computing environment

Abstract: System and network security are vital parts of any autonomic computing solution. The ability of a system to react consistently and correctly to situations ranging from benign but unusual events to outright attacks is key to the achievement of the goals of self-protection, self-healing, and self-optimization. Because they are often built around the interconnection of elements from different administrative domains, autonomic systems raise additional security challenges, including the establishment of a trustworthy system identity, automatically handling changes in system configuration and interconnections, and greatly increased configuration complexity. On the other hand, the techniques of autonomic computing offer the promise of making systems more secure, by effectively and automatically enforcing high-level security policies. In this paper, we discuss these and other security and privacy challenges posed by autonomic systems and provide some recommendations for how these challenges may be met.

Enabling autonomic behavior in systems software with hot swapping

Abstract: Autonomic computing systems are designed to be self-diagnosing and self-healing, such that they detect performance and correctness problems, identify their causes, and react accordingly. These abilities can improve performance, availability, and security, while simultaneously reducing the effort and skills required of system administrators. One way that systems can support these abilities is by allowing monitoring code, diagnostic code, and function implementations to be dynamically inserted and removed in live systems. This "hot swapping" avoids the requisite prescience and additional complexity inherent in creating systems that have all possible configurations built in ahead of time. For already-complex pieces of code such as operating systems, hot swapping provides a simpler, higher-performance, and more maintainable method of achieving autonomic behavior. In this paper, we discuss hot swapping as a technique for enabling autonomic computing in systems software. First, we discuss its advantages and describe the required system structure. Next, we describe K42, a research operating system that explicitly supports interposition and replacement of active operating system code. Last, we describe the infrastructure of K42 for hot swapping and several instances of its use demonstrating autonomic behavior.

The evolution of user-centered focus in the human-computer interaction field

Abstract: About 20 years have passed since the first conferences dedicated to human-computer interaction (HCI) were held. In that time many changes have occurred in how we think about making use of data gathered from users of technology to guide the process of designing and developing new hardware and software systems. Throughout this process there has been a productive dialog among academic and industry-based researchers and usability engineering practitioners. Academic research has provided insights into methods for understanding and modeling user behavior, and industry has provided a wide range of exciting technologies for consideration by researchers in HCI. This paper looks at the evolution of the field from the behavioral science perspective. We consider the evolution of the field within professional groups, such as the Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (ACM SIGCHI) and the International Federation for Information Processing Technical Committee (IFIP TC13), academic departments (primarily in computer science departments), and industry (primarily within IBM). In this paper we offer a view of this journey of 20 years, along with some visions and challenges of the future.

LEO: An autonomic query optimizer for DB2

Abstract: Structured Query Language (SQL) has emerged as an industry standard for querying relational database management systems, largely because a user need only specify what data are wanted, not the details of how to access those data. A query optimizer uses a mathematical model of query execution to determine automatically the best way to access and process any given SQL query. This model is heavily dependent upon the optimizer's estimates for the number of rows that will result at each step of the query execution plan (QEP), especially for complex queries involving many predicates and/or operations. These estimates rely upon statistics on the database and modeling assumptions that may or may not be true for a given database. In this paper, we discuss an autonomic query optimizer that automatically self-validates its model without requiring any user interaction to repair incorrect statistics or cardinality estimates. By monitoring queries as they execute, the autonomic optimizer compares the optimizer's estimates with actual cardinalities at each step in a QEP, and computes adjustments to its estimates that may be used during future optimizations of similar queries. Moreover, the detection of estimation errors can also trigger reoptimization of a query in mid-execution. The autonomic refinement of the optimizer's model can result in a reduction of query execution time by orders of magnitude at negligible additional run-time cost. We discuss various research issues and practical considerations that were addressed during our implementation of a first prototype of LEO, a LEarning Optimizer for DB2® (Database 2TM) that learns table access cardinalities and for future queries corrects the estimation error for simple predicates by adjusting the database statistics of DB2.

Autonomic personal computing

Abstract: Autonomic personal computing is personal computing on autonomic computing platforms. Its goals combine those of personal computing with those of autonomic computing. The challenge of personal autonomic computing is to simplify and enhance the end-user experience, delighting the user by anticipating his or her needs in the face of a complex, dynamic, and uncertain environment. In this paper we identify the key technologies that enable autonomic behavior as distinguished from fault-tolerant behavior. We give some examples of current autonomic behavior and some general considerations for an architecture that supports autonomic personal computing. We identify its challenges to standards and technology developers and conclude with some guidance for future work.

Comparing autonomic and proactive computing

Abstract: This paper provides an overview of the relationship between proactive computing and autonomic computing, considering the design of systems that are beyond the scope of our existing computational infrastructure. Autonomic computing, as described by IBM's manifesto on the subject, is a clear statement of the difficulties and challenges facing the computing industry today. In particular, autonomic computing addresses the problem of managing complexity. Intel Research is exploring computing futures that overlap autonomic computing but also explore new application domains that require principles we call proactive computing, enabling the transition from today's interactive systems to proactive environments that anticipate our needs and act on our behalf.

Two decades of policy-based storage management for the IBM mainframe computer

Abstract: Today, storage management vendors see the need and business opportunity for an enterprise-wide policy-based storage management solution for their customers. In the middle 1980s, IBM introduced the Data Facility Storage Management Subsystem (DFSMS) as a policy-based storage management solution for large mainframe computer systems. As an integral part of the operating systems OS/390® and z/OS™, DFSMS continues to be enhanced. This paper provides an overview of DFSMS and describes a few of its recent enhancements.

Managing Web server performance with AutoTune agents

Abstract: Managing the performance of e-commerce sites is challenging. Site content changes frequently, as do customer interests and business plans, contributing to dynamically varying workloads. To maintain good performance, system administrators must tune their information technology environment on an ongoing basis. Unfortunately, doing so requires considerable expertise and increases the total cost of system ownership. In this paper, we propose an agent-based solution that not only automates the ongoing system tuning but also automatically designs an appropriate tuning mechanism for the target system. We illustrate this in the context of managing a Web server. There we study the problem of controlling CPU and memory utilization of an Apache® Web server using the application-level tuning parameters MaxClients and KeepAlive, which are exposed by the server. Using the AutoTune agent framework under the Agent Building and Learning Environment (ABLE), we construct agents to fully automate a control-theoretic methodology that involves model building, controller design, and run-time feedback control. Specifically, we design (1) a modeling agent that builds a dynamic system model from the controlled server run data, (2) a controller design agent that uses optimal control theory to derive a feedback control algorithm customized to that server, and (3) a run-time control agent that deploys the feedback control algorithm in an on-line real- time environment to automatically manage the Web server. The designed autonomic feedback control system is able to handle the dynamic and interrelated dependencies between the1 tuning parameters and the performance metrics with guaranteed stability from control theory. The effectiveness of the AutoTune agents is demonstrated through experiments involving variations in workload, server capacity, and business objectives. The results also serve as a validation of the ABLE toolkit and the AutoTune agent framework.

A survey of manufacturing flexibility: Implications for e-business flexibility

Abstract: Flexibility is an effective means by which an e-business can hedge against uncertainty in a swiftly changing environment. Systems, applications, and business processes--in short, the entire environment supporting e-business--must seamlessly adapt to changes without costly and time-consuming infrastructure overhauls. Decision makers therefore have a growing need for knowledge about e-business flexibility. However, flexibility remains largely an abstraction in the e-business domain, with the term often meaning different things to different people. Whereas very little systematic research has been directed towards the study of flexibility issues associated with e-business, a rich and burgeoning literature on manufacturing flexibility has accumulated over the past 25 years. In this paper we review the existing literature on manufacturing flexibility, and extract from it guiding principles for creating and managing e-business flexibility.

The evolution of storage systems

Abstract: Storage systems are built by taking the basic capability of a storage device, such as the hard disk drive, and adding layers of hardware and software to obtain a highly reliable, high-performance, and easily managed system. We explain in this paper how storage systems have evolved over five decades to meet changing customer needs. First, we briefly trace the development of the control unit, RAID (redundant array of independent disks) technologies, copy services, and basic storage management technologies. Then, we describe how the emergence of low-cost local area data networking has allowed the development of network-attached storage (NAS) and storage area network (SAN) technologies, and we explain how block virtualization and SAN file systems are necessary to fully reap the benefits of these technologies. We also discuss how the recent trend in storage systems toward managing complexity, ease-of-use, and lowering the total cost of ownership has led to the development of autonomic storage. We conclude with our assessment of the current state-of-the-art by presenting a set of challenges driving research and development efforts in storage systems.

Beyond backup toward storage management

Abstract: The IBM Tivoli Storage Manager, a client/server product providing backup, archive, and space management functions in heterogeneous distributed environments, performs extensive storage management after client data have reached the server. Beyond minimizing the amount of data that a client needs to send on successive backup operations, Tivoli Storage Manager optimizes data placement for disaster recovery, for restore operations, and for fault tolerant access. It also adapts to changes in device technology. The original design points of the product in research have been expanded to provide a comprehensive set of functions that not only facilitate backup but also support content managers and deep storage applications. The design points and functions are described in this paper.

Dynamic reconfiguration: Basic building blocks for autonomic computing on IBM pSeries servers

Abstract: A logical partition in an IBM pSeriesTM symmetric multiprocessor (SMP) system is a subset of the hardware of the SMP that can host an operating system (OS) instance. Dynamic reconfiguration (DR) on these logically partitioned servers enables the movement of hardware resources (such as processors, memory, and I/O slots) from one logical partition to another without requiring reboots. This capability also enables an autonomic agent to monitor usage of the partitions and automatically move hardware resources to a needy OS instance nondisruptively. Today, as SMPs and nonuniform memory access (NUMA) systems become larger and larger, the ability to run several instances of an operating system(s) on a given hardware system, so that each OS instance plus its subsystems scale or perform well, has the advantage of an optimal aggregate performance, which can translate into cost savings for customers. Though static partitioning provides a solution to this overall performance optimization problem, DR enables an improved solution by providing the capability to dynamically move hardware resources to a needy OS instance in a timely fashion to match workload demands. Hence, DR capabilities serve as key building blocks for workload managers to provide self-optimizing and self-configuring features. Besides dynamic resource balancing, DR also enables Dynamic Capacity Upgrade on Demand, and self-healing features such as Dynamic CPU Sparing, a winning solution for users in this age of rapid growth in Web servers on the Internet.

Characteristics of I/O traffic in personal computer and server workloads

Abstract: Understanding the characteristics of I/O traffic is increasingly important as the performance gap between the processor and disk-based storage continues to widen. Moreover, recent advances in technology, coupled with market demands, have led to new and exciting developments in storage systems, particularly network storage, storage utilities, and intelligent self-optimizing storage. In this paper, we empirically examine the physical I/O traffic of a wide range of server and personal computer (PC) workloads, focusing on how these workloads will be affected by the recent developments in storage systems. As part of our analysis, we compare our results with historical data and re-examine some rules of thumb (e.g., one bit of I/O per second for each instruction per second of processing power) that have been widely used for designing computer systems. We find that the I/O traffic is bursty and appears to exhibit self-similar characteristics. Our analysis also indicates that there is little cross-correlation between traffic volumes of server workloads, which suggests that aggregating these workloads will likely help to smooth out the traffic and enable more efficient utilization of resources. We discover that there is significant potential for harnessing "free" system resources to perform background tasks such as optimization of disk block layout. In general, we observe that the characteristics of the I/O traffic are relatively insensitive to the extent of upstream caching, and thus our results still apply, on a qualitative level, when the upstream cache is increased in size.

Trust, the Internet, and the digital divide

Abstract: The Internet is expected to have a positive impact on economic growth, and its adoption rate will determine the extent of this impact. In this paper, we examine how differences in willingness to trust influence Internet adoption rates across countries. We show that trust has a statistically significant influence on levels of Internet penetration across countries. We also show that success in increasing Internet adoption rates through policies to promote trust will depend on a country's current level of trust, such that differences in trust may produce a digital divide among nations. Since low-trust countries tend to be of low or middle income, this digital divide between countries may translate into a developmental divide.

Personalizing the user experience on ibm.com

Abstract: In this paper, we describe the results of an effort to first understand the value of personalizing a Web site, as perceived by the visitors to the site as well as by the stakeholder organization that owns it, and then to develop a strategy for introducing personalization to the ibm.com Web site. We started our investigation by conducting literature reviews, holding brainstorming sessions with colleagues around the world, and performing heuristic usability evaluations of several relevant Web sites. We adopted a User-Centered Design approach and conducted a number of usability studies applied to the subset of the ibm.com Web site that business customers use for all aspects of purchase, service, and support of computer equipment. These studies employed a number of low- and medium- fidelity prototypes that we developed for this purpose. Our proposal for personalizing ibm.com consists of a set of 12 personalization features, selected for the value they offer to customers and to the business.

A system model for dynamically reconfigurable software

Abstract: The ability to reconfigure software is useful for a variety of reasons, including adapting applications to changing environments, performing on-line software upgrades, and extending base application functionality with additional nonfunctional services. Reconfiguring distributed applications, however, can be difficult in practice because of the dependencies that exist among the processes in the system. This paper formally describes a model for capturing the structure and run-time behavior of a distributed system. The structure is defined by a set of elements containing the state variables in the system. The run-time behavior is defined by threads that execute atomic actions called operations. Operations invoke code blocks to bring about state changes in the system, and these state changes are confined to a single element and thread. By creating input/output signatures based upon the variable access patterns of the code blocks, dataflow dependencies among operations can be derived for a given configuration of the system. Proposed reconfigurations can be evaluated through off-line tests using the formal model to determine whether the new mapping of operations-to-code blocks disrupts existing dataflow dependencies in the system. System administrators--or software components that control adaptivity in autonomic systems--can use the results of these tests to gauge the impact of a proposed reconfiguration on the existing system. The system model presented in this paper underpins the design of reconfigurable ARMOR (Adaptive Reconfigurable Mobile Objects of Reliability) processes that provide flexible error detection and recovery services to user applications.

Dealing with ghosts: Managing the user experience of autonomic computing

Abstract: Although the goal of autonomic computing is to make systems that work continuously, robustly, and simply, no one imagines that people can be excluded entirely. Whether it is end users getting their jobs done by interacting with autonomic systems or system administrators maintaining, monitoring, and debugging large-scale systems with autonomic components, humans will always be part of the computational process. As autonomic systems become part of the computing infrastructure, new demands will be placed on all users. How do users understand what autonomic systems are trying to do? How should systems portray themselves to users? How can we design the experience of autonomic computing to amplify user capabilities? This paper presents an analysis of the user experience challenges of autonomic computing and discusses design requirements for user interaction. Our main point is that autonomic computing makes effective design of the user experience even more challenging and critical than it is now. The reason is that autonomic actions taken by the system must be understandable by the user and capable of review, revision, and alteration. Because such actions are often made autonomously, a heavy burden is placed on the ability of the system to explain what it is doing and why.

Toward a new landscape of systems management in an autonomic computing environment

Abstract: In this paper we present IBM Tivoli Monitoring, a systems management application that displays autonomic behavior at run time, and we focus on extending it in order to encompass the design and the deployment phases of the product life cycle. We review the resource model concept, illustrate it with an example, and discuss its role throughout the product life cycle. Then we introduce basic concepts in ontology and description logics and discuss representing Common Information Model constructs using description logics. Finally, we propose Systems Management Ontology, an approach to enhancing the autonomic properties of IBM Tivoli Monitoring based on an ontology service and the technique of "contextual pulling" applied to the resource model.

Clockwork: A new movement in autonomic systems

Abstract: Statically tuned computing systems may perform poorly when running time-varying workloads. Current work on autonomic tuning largely involves reactive autonomicity, based on feedback control. This paper identifies a new way of thinking about autonomic tuning, that is, predictive autonomicity, based on feedforward control. A general method, called Clockwork, for constructing predictive autonomic systems is proposed. The method is based on statistical modeling, tracking, and forecasting techniques borrowed from econometrics. Systems employing the method detect and subsequently forecast cyclic variations in load, estimate the impact on future performance, and use these data to self-tune, dynamically, in anticipation of need. The paper describes a prototype network-attached storage system that was built using Clockwork, demonstrating the feasibility of the method, and presents key performance measurements of the prototype, demonstrating the practicality of the methods.

Internet Protocol storage area networks

Abstract: The sheer scale of the storage needs of most organizations makes block storage management an important system administration problem. Application servers, databases, and file systems rely on an efficient underlying block storage system. The storage area network paradigm is fast emerging as a desirable block storage solution, due to its performance, resource-sharing, and capacity-scaling benefits. This paper shows that the ubiquitous Internet Protocol (IP) network is technically well-suited to host a storage area network. The paper presents the storage protocol, management, and security building blocks that are necessary for making IP storage a reality. The paper then discusses performance issues that must be addressed in order to make IP storage area networks competitive with other storage area network technologies.

Competitive algorithms for the dynamic selection of component implementations

Abstract: As component-based development matures, more and more applications are built by integrating multiple distributed components. We suggest providing components with multiple implementations, each optimized for a particular workload, and augmenting the component run-time environment with a mechanism for switching between implementations. This mechanism monitors the types of requests the component is receiving, and adaptively switches implementations for optimal application performance. Achieving this optimal performance depends on making good choices as to when and how to switch implementations, a problem we refer to as the adaptive component problem. We first formalize the generic problem and then provide an algorithm, named Delta, for switching implementations in the special case when the component has exactly two implementations. We show that this algorithm is (3 + )-competitive with respect to the optimal algorithm, where is a small fraction. We establish a 3-competitive lower bound for the problem, which implies that Delta is close to optimal. We describe the application of these results to the distributed pub/sub problem, and the data structure selection problem.

Autonomic service deployment in networks

Abstract: Networks have been growing dramatically in size and functionality in past years. Internet Protocol network nodes not only forward datagrams using longest-prefix matching of the destination address, but also execute functions based on dynamic policies such as proxy-caching, encryption, tunneling, and firewalling. More recently, programmable behaviors have begun to appear in network elements, allowing experimentation with even more sophisticated services. This paper presents an autonomic approach to network service deployment that scales to large heterogeneous networks. Topological categories of service deployment are introduced. A two-phase deployment mechanism that is split into hierarchically distributed and central computations is presented and illustrated with examples of actual services in a programmable network environment, together with their deployment algorithms and simulation results. Autonomic service deployment allows the distributed and complex capabilities present in network elements to be leveraged more efficiently when installing new services than is possible in traditional centralized network management-based approaches. As a result, installation is faster and use of functional resources is more optimized.