Hidden Heroes of Autonomic Computing

It sounds futuristic—and the way people talk, you'd think IBM had just invented it—but autonomic computing is already a practical reality for webhosts around the world.

by Phil Wainewright Founder of www.aspnews.com, publisher of Loosely Coupled [April 25, 2003]

One of this year's buzzwords is autonomic computing. Closely allied to the concepts of grid and utility computing—and heavily promoted alongside both of them by industry heavyweight IBM—autonomic computing is founded on so-called "self-healing" technologies, which automatically recover from faults without crashing any of the applications running on the system.

It sounds futuristic, and the way people talk about it, you'd think IBM has only just invented this leading-edge notion. Yet autonomic computing is already a practical reality, relied on by hundreds of thousands of businesses all over the world—and it works so well, none of them are aware of its existence.

Magic in the data center
Deep in the cavernous data centers of hundreds of mid-tier webhosting providers, a largely overlooked class of software has been working the magic of autonomic computing for several years now, while protecting the service level pledges and profit margins of their owners. At first glance, the software in question fulfills a thoroughly mundane and unremarkable function. It provides the infrastructure for shared virtual server hosting, enabling small businesses and private individuals to host their websites for as little as $10 a month.

The hidden miracle is that the software holds those websites in virtual suspension, deployed not on a single machine but on any of hundreds or even thousands of separate hardware devices. A failing hard disk, a defective chip or a frozen process in any single machine can't take those websites down with it. The software simply assigns their virtual location to another machine, without missing a beat.

Virtual hosting across rackfuls of commodity hardware changes the economics of hosting even more dramatically than the advent of low-cost rack-mounted servers from the likes of Cobalt (now owned by Sun) and Qube a few years ago. Now providers can turn to blade servers that pack even more devices into a single rack, and the autonomic capabilities allow them to defer repairs for scheduled maintenance runs instead of having to keep engineering teams fully staffed 24x7. It all means businesses can host their Web servers more reliably, and yet pay less for the service.

Then there were three
After the inevitable shakeout of recent years, there are just three companies left competing for leadership of this market—Ensim, Plesk and Sphera (a fourth, Russian-owned SWsoft, is an important player in developing markets). And the battle is heating up. Each has had a change of top management in the past six months, and Ensim and Plesk have gone head-to-head with cut-price migration upgrades to encourage customers to forsake their competitors' platform for their own.

Plesk announced in February that it has reached profitability, and promptly sacked the CEO and chief operating officer who had previously been brought in while it sought to raise venture finance. Now that it has customer cash coming in, it's abandoned its search for outside capital, and the company's founders have stepped back into the top jobs.

Sphera parted ways with its CEO Tamar Naor, announcing the appointment of an acting CEO in February while it seeks "a CEO that is tapped into the U.S. market." It closed a $20 million funding round last year, and says it tripled its revenue growth in 2002, but it is regarded as the number three player.

The most intriguing development has been Ensim's appointment of Kanwal Rekhi as president and CEO last December, replacing company co-founder Rosen Sharma (see A New CEO for Ensim). Rekhi's Silicon Valley track record is impeccable, having founded Excelan, one of the first Internet networking hardware companies in 1982. He then became a founding investor in Exodus, which went on to become a webhosting giant until it was bought out by Cable & Wireless.

Another very bankable name has a big stake in the corporate high-end of the market. OpsWare, formerly known as Loudcloud, offers software that provides automated provisioning and virtualization in enterprise data centers that is the corporate equivalent of the virtual hosting platforms. The company is the brainchild of Marc Andreessen, the Netscape co-founder and designer of the original graphical Web browser Mosaic, first released ten years ago this month.

Hail the silent heroes
With two famous tech industry pioneers firmly committed to leading companies in the market, perhaps the hidden achievements of server virtualization software providers ought not to be so comprehensively ignored. The next time someone mentions autonomic computing, think of all those racks upon racks of Web servers that already bear silent witness to its potential.

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