Autonomic is a word that is increasing being used to describe the ultimate in ease of use of data storage equipment with “autonomic tiering” having recently come into vogue. However, despite there being a plethora of tiering solutions available not all of them are as autonomic as they claim.

My first recollection of the use of the word in an IT context was IBM’s Self-Managing Autonomic Technology which they describe as enabling a fluid response to change like having the ability to manage themselves and dynamically adapt to change such as identifying and correcting problems often before they are noticed by IT personnel. In the context of a tiered storage solution this means the transparent movement of data between tiers with little or no human intervention.

Read more on this thread at the Storage Topics Blog in the post Not-so-Autonomic Storage Tiering by Bill M of Veridictus Associates.

Autonomic Storage

IBM's Storage XIV and Autonomic Computing

Not-so-Autonomic Storage Tiering , from the Storage Topics Blog