ABSTRACT
In an on-demand business, information technology (IT) professionals must strengthen the responsiveness and resiliency of service delivery-improving quality of service-while reducing the total cost of ownership (TCO) of their operating environments. A slowdown in Moore’s law is in near sight and seen as the main obstacle to further progress in the IT industry. Rather, it is the industry’s exploitation of the technologies that have been developed in the wake of Moore’s law that has led us to the verge of a complexity crisis. Software developers have fully exploited a 4 to 6 order-of-magnitude increase in computational power-producing ever more sophisticated software applications and environments. Exponential growth has occurred in the number and variety of systems and components. The value of database technology and the Internet have fueled significant growth in storage subsystems, which now are capable of holding petabytes of structured and unstructured information. Networks have interconnected, distributed, heterogeneous systems. Our information society has created unpredictable and highly variable workloads for these networked systems. Moreover, these increasingly valuable, complex systems require highly skilled IT professionals to install, configure, operate, tune, and maintain them.
