Alan Ganek

VP Autonomic Computing, IBM Corporation

Mr. Ganek leads the IBM Corporate-wide initiative for autonomic computing which focuses on making computing systems more self-managing and resilient, lowering the cost of ownership and removing obstacles to growth and flexibility. This role reaches across IBM, touching virtually all functions. The activity includes leadership in architecture, technology, and standards as well as business and market planning. The focus is on increasing the competitiveness of IBM products and services with the infusion of autonomic computing capabilities, and ensuring that this work is fully linked with consistent, open architecture and standards. A major emphasis is establishing industry wide standards to enable multi-vendor solutions that enable Autonomic Computing capabilities for customers.

Prior to joining IBM Software Group, Mr. Ganek was responsible for the technical strategy and operations of IBM’s Research Division, a worldwide organization focused on research leadership in areas related to information technology as well as exploratory work in science and mathematics. This entailed strategic and technology outlook, portfolio management, and Research Division processes. In addition, Mr. Ganek managed the operational services supporting the Division, including finance, information services, technical journals, and site operations such as facilities management, environmental control, and safety.

Mr. Ganek joined IBM as a software engineer in 1978 in Poughkeepsie, New York where he was involved in operating system design and development, computer addressing architecture, and parallel systems architecture and design. He was the recipient of Outstanding Innovation Awards for his work on Enterprise Systems Architecture/370 and System/390 Parallel Sysplex Design. He subsequently held numerous management and executive positions in operating systems, software quality and manufacturing, and the development of solutions for the Telecommunications and Media industries.

Mr. Ganek received his M.S. in Computer Science from Rutgers University in 1981. He holds 16 patents.

Autonomic Computing: Building Self-Managing Systems

Autonomic Computing is IBM’s corporate-wide initiative which focuses on developing a common approach and terminology to address the challenge of IT complexity by architecting self-managing and more resilient systems, lowering the cost of ownership, reducing the complexity that exists in today’s computing environments, and removing obstacles to growth and flexibility.

This presentation will highlight the concept of Autonomic Computing (AC), the business drivers behind it, and how it addresses the challenges in today’s IT environments. It will describe the overarching unified architecture, the common building blocks of an autonomic system, key product deliverables examples, and the AC Toolkit that makes it easier for developers to add autonomic capabilities into their solutions, accelerating the adoption of autonomic computing technologies. The topic of open standards will be covered, with a brief overview of the emerging standards in this space. Finally, examples of some research challenges in this area will also be provided.

This talk also includes a demonstration of the IBM Autonomic Computing
Toolkit v2.0. The toolkit's problem determination autonomic technologies will illustrate IBM's development of self-healing capabilities, laying the foundation for administrators to detect, analyze, correlate, and resolve IT problems in complex environments, thereby satisfying the first two plateaus of the Autonomic Computing maturity model. The demonstration will feature the Generic Log Adaptor, Log and Trace Analyzer and the Common Base Event rule sets.