Adventures in systems land

I’ve been meaning to respond to Monkchips speculation over IBM and Amazon from last year his follow-up why Amazon don’t need IBM. James and I met-up briefly before Christmas, the day I resigned from IBM UK but we ran out of time to discuss that. I wrote and posted a draft and never got around to finishing it, I was missing context. Then yesterday James published a blog entry entitled “15 Ways to Tell Its Not Cloud Computing”.

The straw that broke the camels back was today, on chinposin Friday, James was clearly hustling for a bite when he tweeted “amazed i didn’t get more play for cloud computing blog”.

Well here you go James. Your analysis and simple list of 15-reasons why it is not a cloud is entertaining, but it’s not analysis, it’s cheerleading.

I’m not going to trawl through the list and dissect it one by one, I’ll just go with the first entry and then revert to discussing the bigger issue. James says “If you peel back the label and its says “Grid” or “OGSA” underneath… its not a cloud.” – Why is that James? How do you advocate organizations build clouds?
Continue reading ‘Clouds and the governor’

There’s an excellent analysis by Frank Dzubeck over on Network World today about the new Enterprise Data Center and that hoary old chestnut latency. I don’t know who briefed Frank, it wasn’t me, Jeff and I talked this afternoon and I asked, it wasn’t him, since the article covered also the z10 announcement, I have a good idea though

Frank covers ensembles, data center utilization and the some of the new data center fabric issues extremely well. He also makes the point, that I’d like folks to be clear about, that this isn’t the resurgance of the mainframe, or everthing back to a central server.

We’ve grown use to indefinite waits, or unbelievably fast response times from certain popular websites, but the emerging problem is around latency in the data center. How to deliver service levels and response times in an increasingly rich and complex systems environment. It’s OK to build a data center or server subsystem focussed around a single business model, something like Amazons EC2 or S3, or Googles search and query engines; it’s another to integrate a vast array of different vendors IT equipment bought at different times for different business applications and services and integrate them all together and orchestrate them as business services. While MapReduce may or may not be as good as, or better than a database, not everything is going to be run in this fashion.

Fibre channel over ethernet is a going to happen, 10Gb ethernet opens up some real options in terms of both integrating systems, and distributing services. It will be almost as fast to connect to another server as it is to talk between cores and processors within the same server. This disclosure from IBM Research today shows the way to the next generation of interconnected infrastructure, working at 300-Gbit/second, the bus goes optical making the integration of rich data systems video, VOIP, total encryption of data, secure key based secure infrastructure services, integrated with more traditional transactional systems a real possibility.

The opportunity isn’t to take the same old stuff and distribute it because the fabric is faster, it’s about better integrating systems, exploiting new ways of doing things. Introducing a common event infrastructure, being more intelligent about WAN and Application routing, having a publish/subscribe/consume model for the infrastructure and genuinely opening it up and simplifying it.

Of course, there a re lots of blanks to be filled in, but the new Enterprise Data Center is taking shape.

It’s not very often these days I get to escape my bunker in IBM Austin. On December the 6th I was asked to speak at the NCOIC Conference and work group in St Petersburg, Florida.

The invitation came in a roundabout way, via Massimo Re Ferre from IBM Italy, and Bob Marcus at SRI. The agenda and speakers looked interesting, and so I decided to take the opportunity and go run some of the current thinking by an influential audience. Speaking right before me was Roger Smith, CTO of the US Army PEO STRI division, and he gave a fascinating talk on warefare simulation and training.

I decided to talk about the evolution of Grid, On Demand, SOA and the Blue Cloud implementation of a Service Oriented Infrastructure. We had a useful discussion on what could be done now, net answer, pretty much all of it. You can’t buy it as a product or solution, but you can build it from either IBM or open standards/source parts now.

What’s made the difference is the ability to build around a common, composite infrastructure for management. Previously we’d tried to build and deliver this everywhere, now it’s much more focussed on platform by platform based implementation. Get it right in one place, move it to another.

I’ve posted the slides on slideshare.net here and I’ve also put the PDF on wordpress for download, here.

A couple of weeks back, I met with Cote, or more correctly, Michael Cote, Analyst from Redmonk, for lunch. I wanted to try out some acronyms with him, talk WSDM, OSGI, SOI, Platform Management, and generally have lunch.

Turns out that Cote was off a couple of days later to Microsofts Tech Ed conference in Orlando, along with my longtime buddy and Redmonk co-founder James Governor. So it was with some interest when Cote posted a twitter entry about the MonkCast #4: ‘URL-based computing’ closer to reality (and so too is the GPLv3) - I was interested in what Cote had heard about MS management efforts.

I had a conference call late in today and right after giving a presentation on SOA and IBM System p. I found my way to a visitors desk over at the IBM Briefing Center and while waiting for the call, clicked on the link for the “monkcast” and listended to the first few minutes. After the conference call I restarted the podcast and while it was playing, I closed the lid to my IBM Thinkpad and as hoped, it kept playing. I walked down the stairs, out the door and across the street and it kept playing. Once in the car, while it was still playing, I reached into my glove compartment and found the 3.5mm to 3.5mmlead and connected my laptop the the AUX port on the GM’s stereo. I listen to it all the way home.

Then it occured to me, was I online via Wireless all the way home? Unlikely. So I guess it must have been cached on my laptop. Either way pretty neatto. No clicking on links to download, no saving files and replaying.

Despite lots of good comments and observation from Cote and the other Redmonk co-founder, Stephen O’Grady, there wasn’t much on the topics I was interested in. Worth listening though.

Monkcast #4 is here.

RedNun’s report on Open Source ESBs is published and it has some useful updates and additional information from her earlier web piece which elicited my “I’m a centrprise architect” response.

In her intro, Anne says “Lightweight open source enterprise service bus (ESB) implementations offer a low cost, scalable, and practical approach to enterprise application integration.” - I’m so with that, but as always with a spin on it. Actually an ESB would make the perfect vehicle(bus geddit?) for system infrastructure integration.

Still much to do on standards, implementations, h/w runtimes etc. but I still firmly believe this is the direction we should be going to implement genuinely interoperable hardware based components. Common messages formats, industry schema, common messaging protocols and one or more buses to intermediate for the components and manage pub/sub etc.. Dynamic, autonomic, vendor neutral hardware, we’ll get there.