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IBM Code for Apache Muse to Spur WSDM Adoption

IBM has contributed software code to the Apache Open Source Foundation to help companies automate their datacenters. The code can be used to make systems intuitively detect when applications or transactions aren't running properly and automatically fix problems before business is impacted. This is especially important in virtualized environments, where hundreds or thousands of different computer systems work together as one -- and a frozen application or system bottleneck can disrupt online transactions.

IBM's software contributions are expected to spur further adoption of Web Services Distributed Management (WSDM), an industry standard that makes technology easier to manage. IBM's code provides a framework for building WSDM interfaces, making it easier for businesses to incorporate the standard into their IT infrastructure. The code is available as part of the open source Apache Muse Project, where developers contribute ideas and improvements to the code through open source collaboration.

"Open standards are the key for building technology that is self-managing and self-healing, and today's announcement is the latest step to bring open frameworks to systems management," said Alan Ganek, Vice President of Autonomic Computing and Chief Technology Officer of IBM Tivoli Software. "By building a community around WSDM, developers can quickly create applications and services that will make systems management smarter and cut IT costs for companies, governments and other organizations."

Today, IT management costs account for up to 70 percent of a CIO's budget, up from 50 percent in 2000. Much of that cost is driven by the time-consuming task of manually integrating incompatible software to manage servers, applications and storage devices. WSDM serves as the "integration glue" between various management tools so they can share information such as the status of systems, workload or available memory. Systems management software based on the WSDM standard can also help isolate the root cause of problems, such as service slowdowns, and analyze and take steps to resolve them.

IBM studies show that data center automation can reduce administrative costs by up to 40 percent and increase IT utilization by up to 25 percent.

WSDM also helps companies build out service oriented architectures (SOAs) by integrating all the different technologies used to manage an SOA, which can span many departments, trading partners and software platforms. Businesses adopting SOA are realizing that having a fully integrated, virtualized infrastructure is important for a successful deployment.

"WSDM represents a usable architecture for autonomic data center management," said Yasushi Ishida, Executive Architect and Vice President, Software Strategy and Architecture, Software Group, Fujitsu Limited. "Fujitsu is developing middleware products incorporating WSDM event format in order to provide faster and more accurate problem determination in enterprise systems. We believe that IBM's contribution of WSDM-based code to the open source community is an important step in advancing adoption of open standards in the area of system management."

IBM's code for the WSDM standard was developed as part of IBM's "autonomic" computing initiative, which spans a wide portfolio of software, hardware and services to automate data centers and help IT systems manage and fix themselves.

IBM has also contributed WSDM tools and code to the Eclipse open source community, through the Test and Performance Tools Platform (TPTP), with the same goal of providing developers with the tools they need to implement WSDM interfaces in their applications and services. The Apache Muse contribution compliments the WSDM-based tools in TPTP, automating and simplifying the task of building WSDM interfaces, especially for users who lack experience in Web services.


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