IBM Cloud Computing Day

Earlier this week I had the opportunity of being invited to IBM's
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

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