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August 11, 2008
Cloud Computing, Virtualization 2.0 Among NGDC Highlights
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Did anyone actually think a conference called Next Generation Data Center (NGDC) would come and go without addressing "the cloud?" In 2008 -- a year destined to go down in the IT annals as the "Year of the Cloud" -- that's not even a possibility. However, cloud computing wasn't the only topic discussed at the show, and even when it was the paradigm du jour, its presentation ranged from "this is what it is" to "this is how it looks" to "this is how we're using it -- today." (And I didn't even attend all of the sessions dedicated to cloud computing.)
The whole NGDC/LinuxWorld show (held last week in San Francisco) kicked off with a keynote by Merrill Lynch Chief Technology Architect Jeffrey Birnbaum, who outlined the investment bank's move to "stateless computing." Actually, he explained, it's not so much about being stateless as it is about where the state is. Merrill Lynch is moving from a dedicated server network to a shared server network, functioning essentially as a cloud that allows Merrill Lynch to provision capacity rather than machines.
Aside from architectural change, Birnbaum says another key element of Merrill Lynch's stateless infrastructure is its enterprise file system, which he believes really should be called an "application deployment system." A namespace environment like the Web, all the components needed for an application to run are referenceable through the file system, thus negating the need for heavy-duty software stacks and golden images. The file system works via a combination of push and pull, or of replication and caching, said Birnbaum. The strategy also works for virtual desktops, he said, with all applications -- including the operating system -- being stream to the thin client.
But keeping things lightweight and flexible is only part of the challenge; workload management also is important. Birnbaum says widespread virtualization is a key to this type of infrastructure, but some applications can't handle performance overhead imposed by running in a virtual environment. For these types of applications, a stateless computing platform needs the ability to host applications either physically or virtually. Additionally, says Birnbaum, everything has to be policy-based so primary applications get their resources when they need them. On the workload management front, Merrill Lynch is working with Evergrid, Platform Computing and SoftModule.
For the folks concerned about capital expenditure, the best part about Merrill Lynch's stateless vision is that it can be done on mostly (if not entirely) commodity hardware. Because the state is in the architecture instead of an individual machine, Birnbaum says you can buy cheaper, less redundant and less specialized hardware, ditching failed machines and putting the work elsewhere without worry.
One of the big business benefits of stateless computing at Merrill Lynch is that it lets the financial services leader maximize utilization of existing resources. If someone needs 2,000 servers for an exotic derivatives grid and the company is only at 31 percent utilization, it has that spare capacity and doesn't have to buy those additional servers, Birnbaum explained. Offering some insight into the financial mindset, Birnbaum added that Merrill Lynch buys new servers when it reaches 80 percent utilization, therefore ensuring a capacity cushion in case there is a spike.
Speaking less about a real-world internal cloud deployment and more about the building blocks of cloud computing was Appistry's Sam Charrington. One of his key takeaways was that while virtualization is among cloud computing's driving technologies, a bunch of VMs does not equal a cloud. It's great to be able to pull resources or machines from the air, Charrington explained, but the platform needs to know how to do it automatically.
Beyond getting comfortable with underlying technologies and paradigms like virtualization and SOA, Charrington also advised would-be cloud users to get familiar with public clouds like Amazon EC2, GoGrid and Google App Engine; inventory their applications to see what will work well in the cloud; and to get a small team together to plan for and figure out the migration.
Looking forward, Charrington says the cloud landscape will consist not only of the oft-discussed public clouds like EC2, but also will include virtual private clouds for specific types of applications/industries (like a HIPAA cloud for the medical field) and private, inside-the-firewall clouds. Citing The 451 Group's Rachel Chalmers, Charrington said the best CIOs will be the ones who can best place applications within and leverage this variety of cloud options.
The cloud also was the focus of grid computing veteran Ravi Subramaniam, principal engineer in the Digital Enterprise Group at Intel. Subramaniam led his presentation by noting that cloud computing is not "computing in the clouds," mainly because whether it is done externally or internally, cloud computing is inherently organized, and users know the provider -- be it Amazon, Google or your own IT department. Illustrating a sort of cloud version of Newton's third law, Subramaniam pointed out that for every one of cloud computing's cons, there is an equally compelling pro: security issues exist, but CAPEX and OPEX savings can be drastic; end-users might have limited control of the resources, but those resources are simple to use by design; and so on.
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