IBM Cloud Computing Day
Reuven Cohen
Cloud Computing day at their Canadian headquarters in Markham Ontario
(just outside of Toronto). The invite only event brought together key
IBM employees and researchers from The Centre of Excellence for
Research in Adaptive Systems (CERAS) and focused on emerging
technologies, methods and architectures for cloud computing.
Before this event I had never heard of CERAS, they describe themselves
as an innovative, collaborative virtual organization which explores
and evolves promising new technologies, methods and techniques that
enable dramatically more agile approaches to software development and
evolution; approaches that enable delivery of software and computing
resources on demand and on time, with less operational effort. Simply
explained its a joint partnership between IBM research and a number of
University CS research labs.
One of the more interesting aspects of the event was Andrew Trossman's
introduction to Cloud Computing. His presentation looked more like a
comedy routine and was very entertaining. (At one point he answered a
phone call from his security guard at his home, which was hilarious)
One of the main points I took away from his presentation was that most
people at IBM really have no idea what cloud computing is and a few
select early adopters such as Trossman are key to pushing the cloud
agenda within IBM. I also found it interesting, that they do seem to
utilize a kind of internal "research cloud" for researches within IBM,
but appear to have no intentions to offer this type of service
commercially. They were vague on exactly what or how this cloud
worked.
Other interesting presentations included "Self-Optimization in the
Cloud" by Murray Woodside at Carleton University. He presented a
compelling approach to what he called "autonomic computing" whereby
resources levels are automatically adjusted based on application
response times. His presentation also touched upon "self healing"
system but did little explain how this would actually function.
Woodside's research seemed ideally suited for environments like Amazon
EC2 where you may need to adjust your virtual resources for short
periods of time. Although he was a little hazy on the which
technologies he used and whether it would ever be made available
commercially (I can only assume his research was based on IBM's Tivoli
suite). I look forward to seeing these features some day included in
IBM's data center software.
The brief presentation by Christina Amza on Dynamic Provisioning was
particularly interesting. She presented her work on the challenges to
dynamically "packing" virtual machines into the cloud using a unique
packing algorithm which helps determine the optimal location of each
VM. Her questions to me about Enomalism, was by far some of the most
difficult I've ever had to answer. Dynamic provisioning is in my
opinion one of the most difficult and potentially lucrative areas in
the development of clouds for both private and utility use. The
ability to effectively manage thousands of virtual and physical
servers may mean the difference between a profit and a complete
failure. Her research looks very promising and I know that I could
certainly use her work in our software if she ever decides to make it
publicly available (I assume IBM is thinking along the same lines.)
All in all It was interesting to get a birds-eye view of the cloud
computing programs going on within IBM's research labs and their
related technology groups. Although the event was fairly academic, it
did give me unique opportunity to see what IBM is up to. From my
outsiders point of view, I can summarize IBM's "blue cloud" as a way
for them to repackage their existing data center management tools to
enable the creation of "private clouds" for IBM's enterprise
customers. From what I saw I don't think we'll be seeing anything like
a Amazon EC2 or Google App Engine anytime in the near future. What I
think we will see from them is an active involvement in the
development of cloud computing technologies as well as number of
select cloud technology acquisitions.
(Original Post: http://elasticvapor.com/2008/06/ibm-cloud-computing-day.html)
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Reuven Cohen
Founder & Chief Technologist, Enomaly Inc.
blog > www.elasticvapor.com
Shane
any sense from the IBM folks on whether or not they felt the core
software infrastructure for cloud services should be open source? I
get the feeling from your post that they were holding back on sharing
some of the details of what they're up to.
Marius Slavescu
pretty well the mood of the event.
The event was basically about CERAS projects (all
being research projects around adaptive systems) and
how they work toward building a cloud computing
environment (I'll explain on another thread what I
mean by that) on top of the CERAS infrastructure.
You can read more about CERAS here:
https://www.cs.uwaterloo.ca/twiki/view/CERAS
Marius
Anil K Kakarla
Tross
When you only have 30 minutes to speak it's hard to cover everything
you want to. I had two main goals for my talk early in the day.
First, I wanted to wake up the crowd with a little excitement to get
them energized. Second, I wanted to give the crowd something to start
thinking about by walking through an overview of the cloud space with
some hints to what the future might hold. From your post and comments
from other attendees I think I succeeded on both these two goals. It
didn't hurt that I got 3 back to back phone calls to add a little
humour to the presentation. BTW, I do not have a "security guard"
standing by my house day and night ;-). I got a call from the guy who
installed my alarm system and as you noted he was very persistent.
Clearly I did not speak much to what IBM has already made public and I
failed to mention a lot of IBM's activities that are widely known. I
mistakenly assumed people already knew about the work with Google for
universities or the cloud centers built out around the world, or the
Virtual Loaner Program that has been around for years. This was not
meant to be "holding back" rather just crunched for time.
I would certainly agree that most people don't know "get" cloud
computing yet. In fact, most of the researchers and other
presentations the other day were not really about cloud. Rather these
were updates on more general efforts that have been in research on
autonomic systems for years. Clearly there is applicability to cloud
computing. I'm also pleased to see that many of the efforts have
focused on the use of server virtualization. It is, however, very
true that the Center for Advanced Studies (CAS) Cloud Computing day
was not strictly about cloud computing.
This kind of forum is really about interfacing with the academic
community to help guide their research efforts. From this
perspective, I think my presentation and yours helped to give the
researchers a better understanding about the current state and future
directions of cloud computing. That said, I look forward to see how
the research evolves to be more directly applicable to commercial
cloud offerings.
Andrew Trossman techy geek wannabe comedian ;-)
Shane
made with Google, and it sounds pretty exciting. I'll have to follow
the links and dig a little deeper to learn more. Anyone know if there
are videos or slide decks from the conference that are available
online?
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Reuven Cohen
Over the last few day I've received a number of emails about my recent
IBM commentary. A lot of people seem to be ready to read quite a bit
more into what I wrote. I am neither for or against IBM. As one of the
most dominate players in the data center space, how IBM approachs
cloud computing effects everyone involved in the emerging space. My
biggest complain is because of sheer volume of acquisitions, IBM is
forced to use what they have (a suite of fairly random data center
components) rather then to re-invent something totally new and unique.
In my opinion the days of centralized data center management are
numbered and from what I can see they have yet to embrace a
decentralized approach to cloud management.
What I tried to do is paint the picture that I saw as an outsider.
And as an outsider I saw a lot of opportunities available in weaker
areas of IBM's cloud strategy (Dynamic Provisioning and data center to
cloud migrations - D2C). I should also note this was a research
focused event and only showed a small part of their overall strategy.
At the end of the day I have no doubt IBM will become a dominate
player space, but whether it's through acquisitions or R&D is still to
be determined.
Reuven
www.elasticvapor.com
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www.enomaly.com :: 416 848 6036 x 1
skype: ruv.net // aol: ruv6
blog > www.elasticvapor.com
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