Towards An Automatic IT Infrastructure Management Paradigm for Manufactory and Enterprise

Mission critical manufactory and enterprise IT infrastructure and on-line Internet services require 24x7 availability and usually have an agreed Service Level Agreements (SLA) around its services offering. Currently, most enterprise and manufactory IT datacenters experience severe problems managing the large N tier, networked environments that these mission critical systems run on. Most of these problems arise from the complexity of the infrastructure (containing many moving parts) itself rather than building the applications. Maintainability of the IT system for long-term operational efficiency is largely missing. On the other hand, new IT technologies aiming at automating the deployment and maintenance of IT infrastructure are emerging. One promising technology is that of autonomic computing where the IT infrastructure and its components are self-configuring, selfhealing, self-optimizing and self-protecting and thus free of the management complexity to a large degree. This paper proposes a management model for enterprise IT infrastructure using self-managing paradigm for enterprise IT system and then describes the procedure for using the model as the basis for providing realistic Quality of Service (QoS) and SLA for IT infrastructure services. We also suggest this autonomic infrastructure management model be applied to the management of complex manufacturing systems, including the management of the enhanced agile/lean/integration and configurable manufacturing systems.