FOCUS CLOUD COMPUTING
Issue 3, April 2009
IBM’S DATA CENTER SOLUTIONS
If turning your data center into a cloud-driven moneymaker seems like a long-term ambition, IBM data center consultant Stephen Bowden has some advice for data center managers. Bowden’s division, the IBM systems and technology group, has the technology for more direct action that could be implemented tomorrow.
Active Energy Manager 4.1 is the latest tool from IBM to help clients fight the power struggle in the data center. This will have particular resonance with anyone using cloud computing in their data center, advises Bowden. “The challenge you have with the cloud in your data center is in staying within your power cap [limit],” says Bowden.
Active Energy Manager, which can fit under the umbrella of IBM System Director, presents the DC manager with an easier way to monitor and throttle down servers not in use. Though some managers might content themselves with the fact that idling server CPUs are using less power than they would in full number-crunching mode, Bowden points out that a further 20% saving on power can be made by powering them down fully. By automating the process, IBM says it can encourage managers to make the full cost saving. It’s all part of the trend to measure power usage and heat generation, with a much greater degree of detail. “Once they had one electricity meter by the door,” says Bowden. “Soon every unit in the data center will be monitored.”
Power can already be optimised automatically, but soon the temperature at every grid reference on the data center can be individually set to suit its profile. A new pilot system (MMT 1.5) offers a web client that enables fluctuations in conditions (such as the local temperature around a rack moving out of its optimised level) to be identified and neutralised from the desktop. “We’ll be able to see the cost of any disruption and react quickly,” he says. “That’s the vision.”
It might be a vision that’s easier to make sense of than the cloud. the ancient mainframe operating system.
One of the great assets of the cloud is its flexibility, according to Chiu. You can plug in an IBM P Series, the cloud finds it, then automatically installs VMWare on it in 20 minutes – at which point every unit of processing power, storage and memory becomes manageable and ready to be used by whomever, and for however long they’ve been given. That’s the theory, anyway.
Many CIOs are not so sure. “The problem I have with the concept is that I don’t know where my application is running,” says Mike Russell, IT director of Atkins Global.
“The cloud is simply a way of making all machines look the same,” explains IBM’s Timothy Jones, manager of information services at IBM’s Zurich research laboratory. Jones prefers to simplify the presentation of the cloud. “We define it as a network-delivered service that a user can get with minimal configuration,” he says.
If CIOs are still unimpressed, the business logic of the cloud may be easier to understand when viewed from the perspective of someone who is one degree removed from the people who are involved with the technology.
iTricity is a Netherlands-based hosted computing service provider that builds data centers that use IBM technology as part of its cloud computing offering. The business model is to build data centers (it
16
www.datacenterdynamics.com
“It’s not just about infrastructure, platform and application services. The cloud can create business and even people services”
has built seven so far in Holland and Germany) and then rent out computing capacity to companies as and when they need it. Clients are mostly financial institutes anxious to meet compliance regulations such as Basel II and Sarbanes-Oxley by mitigating the risk of system availability not being up to scratch.
The cells of this IT capacity (such as servers) aren’t directly apportioned to any one client, so no company can say with any certainty that it owns any server on the data center. And yet they have the confidence that every blade of capacity is accounted for. Their risk-averse clients buy into this model too. “We underwrite the risk [of not meeting compliance standards] for the client,” explains CEO Robert Rosier. “When they see we can do that, they feel confident enough to trust us with their systems.”
The service provider came to use cloud computing to serve up its computing power purely by chance. Up until three years ago, the data centers it ran were enterprise resource services and the provisioning tool it used to control the supply of service was Fujitsu’s Flatframe.
But as the concept of cloud computing gradually evolved, iTricity (by now a client handling tens of billions of dollars of IT service) asked if Flatframe could ever become a management platform in its own right rather than a tool used within Oracle or SAP. Fujitsu didn’t see it that way, so iTricity sought an alternative way of provisioning service.
It is a measure of the maturity of cloud computing that they chose to use a Blue Cloud from IBM. “But we had to demand a lot of extra functions. They wanted it to be purely a tool for controlling NAS, whereas we wanted it not just for SAN but for network provisioning and the bare metal [processing power] itself,” says Rosier.
The moral, it seems, is that if you get into the cloud early enough, and forcefully enough, you can shape the way the technology evolves to your own advantage. iTricity seems to have a lot of influence over IBM, judging by the number of IBM clients and development partners Rosier is wheeled out to meet.
Rosier says iTricity is gaining popularity as a data center model as its business benefits are obvious. IT capacity becomes an operational expenditure rather than a capital cost, which helps in the current economy. Better still, excess capacity can be rented back to the service provider and sold on to other clients. “A client such as PWC needs 220% more capacity at year-end, while this is a quiet time for some other clients.” The excess capacity can be shifted between the two.
“Our model of computing allows greater fluidity and efficiency,” says Rosier. “It means you don’t have to pay for resources that stand idle – and that’s a major problem for most data centers.”
Cloud computing could turn your data center from a cost centre to a money generator, argues Rosier. People have probably heard those arguments before, “but we have real life examples,” he says.
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56