Grid Meter » IBM developerWorks: Grid Pushing IT Automation Boundaries

December 06, 2005 | Comments: (0)

IBM developerWorks: Grid Pushing IT Automation Boundaries

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IBM developerWorks editor Mary McCommon is maintaining probably the most informative knowledge base for enterprise Grid developers out there. If you're trying to track Grid computing and the most important technical issues -- do yourself a favor and plug into the RSS feed. No, I'm not on the payroll ;)

This week, IBM DW's lead story comes from Matt Haynos, program director for Grid Technology and Strategy at IBM. Haynos highlights that automation is key to Grid environments, but notes that automation is inherently at odds with many IT manager's predisposition for proactively managing and monitoring their systems:

"I hark back to my programmer days when I spent many hours with UNIX shell scripts. I'd spend weeks perfecting a script to automate some development or administration activity that promised to make my job -- and my company's -- life easier. Every time it ran, I'd check that the results were expected. I babysat the script for weeks on end until I was comfortable that it was running correctly. I was inherently distrustful until I assured myself that the script was doing what I had intended it to do. It was clear sailing from there."

So Haynos calls out this "human element" involved with getting comfortable with automation. A Grid service requires a certain quanta of resource (storage / compute / etc.) to run ... and there are a wide range of commercial tools that come into play for the provisioning and orchestration in the Grid environment. Getting comfortable with the automation of managing your Grid environment, however, is a tough proposition for many IT managers. This is an excellent read for understanding the psychology behind that uncertainty.

Posted by Greg Nawrocki on December 6, 2005 10:15 AM

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