FOCUS CLOUD COMPUTING
Issue 3, April 2009
IBM INNOVATION CENTRE: A HEADS-UP IN THE CLOUD
The pace of developments in the cloud computing space are breathtaking. In the fi rst issue of DatacenterDynamics FOCUS, December 2008, we ran a feature, ‘Cloud computing and the virtualised data center’, which examined how companies such as IBM and Microsoft were defi ning cloud computing, and how their nascent data center strategies were forming. Now, just four months later, Microsoft and IBM are solidifying their positions. A trip to IBM’s Cloud Computing labs in Dublin off ered some invaluable insight into how the company views the cloud from the data center and, just as importantly, how it views the data center from the cloud.
“The problem with cloud computing,” complained one chief information officer we spoke with prior to this trip, “is that it’s so nebulous – it’s everything and nothing.” Vendors call it a distributed computing architecture, but data center managers worry that it’s all over the place.
In an attempt to simplify the matter, Willy Chiu, vice president of IBM Cloud Labs, explained all the levels on which IBM sees cloud computing working. “It’s not just about infrastructure, platform and application services; the cloud can create business and even people services,” he explained.
At the infrastructure level, the concept offers a way to aggregate all the disparate machines on a network – everything from servers to storage controllers to CPUs could be utilised to maximum efficiency.
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This is the foundation for virtualising every element on the network. Then, for every application, you can quantify exactly how much processing power, storage and bandwidth they are allowed to use.
The next level of the cloud manages the infrastructure, so all the different virtual machines can be collated in some way. IBM calls this Infrastructure as a Service. This effectively makes the entire infrastructure one platform, even though it’s made up of many different machines.
The top level of cloud computing introduces one further dimension of control – time. So any amount of computing resources can be scheduled to any particular job, or a specific amount of time. This explains why IBM describes this level of cloud computing as Platform as a Service, which sounds rather like VMS (virtual machine service),
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