Future dynamic data centers are evolving to adopt SOA and utility and grid computing that requires the management infrastructure to evolve accordingly. We have described how this evolution should take place to support autonomic behavior at a platform level as well as a group level. Our vision for supporting SOA is to transform data centers into pools of resources that can be accessed as a utility. Achieving this vision requires a dynamic SOI that decouples services from infrastructure, and incorporates the ability to map applications to infrastructure adaptively. Thus, a model which captures both static and dynamic states of the IT infrastructure, services, and applications, together with their relationships, resource requirements and SLOs is required. In addition, autonomics will enable the IT infrastructure to achieve the required SLOs by making policy-based autonomic decisions.

Autonomic systems will adjust to changing loads by assigning resources as needed under given policies. These systems manage themselves with minimum human intervention allowing IT personnel to focus on business processes. Our platform autonomics approach provides a separate container for the autonomic functions that are exposed via well-defined interfaces. The platform autonomic container provides increased availability by allowing the autonomic manager to operate in both pre-OS and post-OS states. Intel® AMT is Intel's platform support and container for AC. It currently offers the ability to discover, heal, and protect computing assets using standard Web services interfaces. The features of Intel AMT will continue to be enhanced to provide the platform management functions needed for a self-managed infrastructure.