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May 19, 2008
Catching Up on Cloud: An Interview with IBM
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If there's one company trying to scatter cloud computing across the planet -- like some kind of big, blue cloud, you might say -- it's IBM. And one of the top guys behind IBM's cloud initiatives is Dennis Quan, chief technology officer for High-Performance On-Demand Solutions. The HiPODS team is charged with helping customers smartly grow and manage their datacenters, accelerate time to market and reduce IT complexity, among other things. In this Q&A with GRIDtoday, Quan gave us 29 minutes to recap some of the high points of IBM's busy past six months or so in cloud computing. Then he had to catch a plane.
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GRIDtoday: When customers ask you to explain cloud computing, what do you tell them?
DENNIS QUAN: Cloud computing is about providing applications to large numbers of users via the network and their connected mobile devices, their laptop computers or whatever, and having an IT infrastructure, a cloud computing center, that's capable of supporting large numbers of applications, and being able to massively scale to meet growing user demands. We've actually been able to prove out these concepts in some projects in use within IBM. And we've found that one of the key characteristics is not only scaling to demands, but being able to get applications on board and running as quickly as possible. This is critical for this generation of applications because of the innovation cycle being so fast today. You really need to get innovators the compute resources they need, and that's one of our goals with our on-demand solutions.
One message that resonates well with customers is being able to increase the speed at which they can prototype their apps and get feedback. Because we're using virtualization and provisioning automation, we're able to allow people to go to a self-service portal and say "I need these Linux boxes with an app server," and so on, and be able to get that done within minutes. You know, as opposed to taking potentially weeks to acquire the machines and set them up and rack them and install the software themselves. That is extremely appealing to our customers. They also like having the freedom to run any kind of workload they like and put any kind of software on the cloud that they like. It's not limited to back-end tasks, batch-processing tasks; it could be user-facing applications, it could be Web servers, it could be database servers.
Gt: What's one of your most compelling examples of cloud computing?
QUAN: About two and a half years ago we launched a cloud within IBM, the Innovation Portal. When individual users at IBM had a new idea -- instead of having to hunt down permission to buy a new machine and having to find a place to host it and install it, etc., which is not only time-consuming but also resource- consuming because they have to handle all the system admin stuff -- what they can do instead is go to this self-service portal and request resources. It can be 20 virtual machines running Linux and WebSphere and DB2, for example, or any number of combinations. It's a lot like booking a hotel room on a Web site. You're able to get access to a certain number of resources for a period of time, and the system goes off and provisions that for you, and you're given access to those machines, with all the software and middleware, etc., set up for you.
Since launching this cloud within IBM, we've had over 100 projects run on it, and about 20 percent have contributed to technology used in shipping products.
The applications and projects we've run in the cloud have ranged from collaboration tools to social networking tools to development tools -- and even a game. What we've found is that people are able to access compute resources very quickly, which benefits not just individual innovators with a brand new idea but also design teams who want to test their new product on the greater IBM population. A software development company could use this kind of cloud to do in-house testing and quality control.
Gt: What software is at the heart of this cloud?
QUAN: We put together this cloud solution based on our Tivoli products -- Tivoli Provision Manager, Tivoli Monitoring -- and that's really been the foundation architecture that we've been using in all our explorations of cloud computing.
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