Autonomic Computing (AC) is maturing from a design philosophy to an emerging set of technologies and products that addresses the complexity of managing today's heterogeneous data centers and computing environments. This overview paper explains our motivation and outlines our technologies that provide platform support for AC. Specifically, we are developing platforms with sufficient support and on-board intelligence to enable autonomic capabilities, such as self-healing and self-protecting, as well as features such as discovery and asset tracking, even when the host Operating System (OS) is inactive. To achieve these ends we are dedicating select platform resources and firmware, both exposed via well-defined standard interfaces, to implement a set of management and autonomic capabilities, and in the future, we hope to extend these platform autonomic capabilities, with appropriate management policies, to groups of platforms and eventually to the entire data center. Such interconnected autonomic platforms will provide the infrastructure and fabric to support service-oriented, grid, and utility computing.

This paper also expounds on the Intel® Active Management Technology† (Intel® AMT) which is the first product incarnation of a framework and dedicated platform execution environment for AC. We also discuss how manageability architectures need to evolve to support autonomic behavior at a group level, such as defining interactions among platforms within a group to collectively deliver on specific goals and implement group-level policies. We cite examples related to malware detection and power management that illustrate how this new approach to managing IT infrastructure works.

† Intel® Active Management Technology requires the computer to have additional hardware and software, connection with a power source, and a network connection. Check with your PC manufacturer for details.