Big Blue is demonstrating a second phase in its eLiza plan to build autonomic computers that can anticipate and recover from problems without human intervention. Now IBM is showing software called Enterprise Workload Manager that governs not just single servers but groups, monitoring the machines and shifting work among them.
IBM is aggressively researching ways to get groups of servers to work together without human intervention, but it isn't the only one. Sun Microsystems in February uncloaked "N1," which treats groups of computers like a single pool of processing and storage power. And Hewlett-Packard plans a " utility data center" to simplify management of data centers crammed with computing equipment.