Friday, July 20, 2007

A Helping Hand Comes In Handy Sometimes

You may remember my recent post on how data centers resemble complex adaptive systems. This description of a data center has a glaring difference from a true definition of complex adaptive systems, however; data centers require some form of coordinated management beyond what any single entity can provide. In a truly complex adaptive system, there would be no "policy engines" or even Network Operations Centers. Each server, each switch, each disk farm would attempt to adapt to its surroundings, and either survive or die.

Therein lies the problem, however. Unlike a biological system, or the corporate economy, or even a human society, data centers cannot afford to have one of its individual entities (or "agents" in complex systems parlance) arbitrarily disappear from the computing environment. It certainly cannot rely on "trial and error" to determine what survives and what doesn't. (Of course, in terms of human management of IT, this is often what happens, but never mind...)

Adam Smith called the force that guided selfish individuals to work together for the common benefit of the community the "invisible hand". The metaphor is good for explaining how decentralized adaptive systems can organize for the greater good without a guiding force, but the invisible hand depends on the failure of those agents who don't adapt.

Data centers, however, need a "visible hand" to quickly correct some (most?) agent failures. To automate and scale this, certain omnipotent and omnipresent management systems must be mixed into the data center ecology. These systems are responsible for maintaining the "life" of dying agents, particularly if the agents lose the ability to heal themselves.

Now, a topic for another post is the following: can several individual resource pools, each with their own policy engine, be joined together in a completely decentralized model?

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