Adventures in systems land

I’ve had a few emails asking me if I was going to write a log entry on this month announcements, and to be honest I wasn’t. They are an impressive list of products, branding and customer announcements. I wasn’t anything to do with them, given I’m no longer asked to do marketing/sales types presentations, I picked that time to go do the Machupichhu/Inca trail trip in Peru.

The April announcements though were a credit to the teamwork across the even more global IBM. Core Processor and server development teams in Austin and Rochester, worked with domain specialists in Poughkeepsie and Boeblingen. On top of this were the software development and test teams in India, China and and ever increasing number of places.

The new UNIX enterprise server, the Power™ 595 is an impressive beast if the charts are anything to go by. I’m hoping to get Nancy to take me across the building to the test bring-up to have an up close and personal look sometime this week. The new POWER6 “Hydro-Cluster” supercomputer, the Power 575, is very impessive using a new super-dense system, with a unique, in-rack, water-cooling system and with 448 processor cores per rack. Apprently it offers users nearly five times the performance and more than three times the energy efficiency of its predecessor, IBM’s POWER5+™ processor running upto a industry busting clock cycle of up to 5 GHz.

These Super-dense systems are starting to become a really interesting value prop. On Friday I got a link to the IBM.COM public website that included a video on our iDATAPLEX offering. It was there Saturday and has gone today, but it was there as this search in the current google index shows. The video doesn’t show any technical details but does give an interesting insight into this x86 based super-dense, Internet scale, behemoth of a server. I was hoping there was other public comment or blog entries I could leach off for discussion points, but the only search results return job postings

Anyone go to the iDATAPLEX session at IMPACT 2008 and want to comment ??

I posted my thoughts on some comments received, as well as a few emails I got offblog, as a response in this thread.

Well there you go, I mention Nigel in a blog entry on Amazon and Clouds, and a couple of days later Nigel is named as new CMO for AMD. Nice one Nigel, look forward to seeing you here in Austin!

 Business Wire Coverage

Thanks for the comments and emails on my recent posts on cloud computing wrt IBM, I’ll post some more useful discussion, feedback shortly but am bust traveling now. This flashed past my screen this morning though, net net, it is a press release announcing that our HiPods team is opening a cloud computing center in Dublin. Worth a brief read.

Here is the post I mentioned in yesterday’s Clouds and the governor post. I’ve deleted some duplicate comment but wanted to publish some of the things left over.

It was an unexpected pleasure to catch-up with Redmonk maestro and declarative liver(?) James Governor over Christmas, while back in the UK. It wasn’t a tale of Christmas past, but certainly good to see him at Dopplr mansions in East London. Sorry to Matt and the Dopplr guys for busting in on them in my xmas hat and not introducing myself.

James and I didn’t have much time together, I’d just got through handing in my IBM UK badge, and returning all three of their laptops, bidding fairwell to Larry, Colin and Paul, and wanted to head off to see my parents. We squeezed in a quick coffee and a chat, James was keen to discuss his theory on Linux distributions, I didn’t have any reason to really pitch for, or against this and just told him what I knew. We didn’t have time for much else, we did discuss erlang briefly both as a language, but also on explotation of multi-core, multi-threaded chips, and I’ll come back to that one day. What we didn’t get to discuss was Amazon, cloud computing and James on/off theory on IBM and Amazon.

There is no doubt in my mind that on demand computing, cloud, ensembles, call it what you will computing is happening and will continue apace. I’ve been convinced since circa ‘98, and spent 6-weeks one summer in 1999 with now StorageTek/Sun VP, then IBM System z marketing guy, Nigel Dessau getting me in to see IBM Execs to discuss the role of utility computing. After that I did a stint in the early Grid days, and then on demand architecture and design.

So, whats this with Amazon? Yes, their EC2 and S2 offering are pretty neat; yes Google is doing some fascinating things building their own datacenters and machines, so is Microsoft and plenty of others. One day, is it likely that most computing will come over the wire, over the air, from the utility? Yes.

Thats not just a client statement, there is plenty of proof that is happening already, but a server or applications statement. Amazon API’s are really useful. I wish we had some application interfaces, and systems that worked the same way, or perhaps as James might have it, we had Amazons web services, perhaps without the business that goes behind it. Are we interested in Amazon, don’t know, I’m neither in corporate or IBM Software group business development.

It comes back to actionable items, buying, partnering or otherwise adopting Amazons web services, really wouldn’t move the ball forward for the bulk of our customers.

Sure, it would open up a whole new field of customers who are looking for innovative ways to get computing at lower cost, so are our existing customers. This would be of little use short term as there are few tools built around. I work at a company that helps customers. There are some things we are doing that are very interesting for the future, but what is more interesting is bridging from the current world and the challenges of doing that. Like every new technology, cloud computing will have to be eased into. We can’t suddenly expect customers to drop what they have and get up into the clouds and so that means integration.

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’

I never really got casual Friday. Here at IBM, Friday pm is Think Friday, no repetitive meetings, time to think and urgent meetings only. Yep, I wear my jeans in on Fridays and try to catch up on email, not much time to think. Casual Friday for me though is more than clothes, it’s a state of mind thing for me, that stems back to my time at Chemical Bank out on Long Island, NY in the early 1980’s.

When we started at the data center, the place was still a building site and we wore what we liked. Over the next 15-months though things quietened down, other people started working in the office and a bunch of mid-20’s mainframe geeks with t-shirts, sometimes shorts etc. stuck out a bit for a bank. Then the day came, my boss, Phil Gross, pointed out we were possibly amongst the highest paid people in the building, we were paid to think smart, and so we should dress smart. From then on it was back to normal shirt/tie etc, apart from the twice yearly lobster parties in the parking lot. One day perhaps we’ll get John McNic to start a web site with pictures, hopefully I’ll be retired by then…

So now we have chinposin Friday. If you are on twitter or flickr, post a picture that reflects you in a chinposin mood. This week I’ve been reflecting on my past and my future, so this chin pose is a good summary. Great fun, pretty simple, some people have been doing very funny things! Here’s to chinposin.

One of the topics I’m trying to close on at the moment is Power Systems Security. I have my views on where I think we need to be, where the emerging technology challenges are, what the industry drivers are(yours and ours), and the competitive pressures.

If you want to comment or email me with your thoughts on Power Systems security, I’d like to hear. What’s important, what’s not?  Of course I’m interested in OS related issues, AIX, i, or Linux on Power. I’m also interested in requirements that span all three, that need to apply across hardware and PowerVM.

Interested in mobility? Want your keys to move between systems with you? Not much good if you move the system but can’t read the data becuase you don’t have key authority. Is encryption in your Power Systems future? Is it OK to have it in software only, to have it as an offload engine or does it need to run faster via acceleration. Do you have numbers, calculations on how many, what key sizes etc.

Let’s be clear though, we have plans and implementations in all these areas. What I’m interested in are your thoughts and requirements.

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.

IBM announced today our new Enterprise Data Center vision. There are lots of links from the new ibm.com/datacenter web page which split out into their various constituencies Virtualization, Energy Efficiency, Security, Business resiliency and IT service delivery.

To net it out from my perspective though, there is a lot of good technology behind this, and an interesting direction summarized nicely starting on page-10 on the POV paper linked from the new data center page or here.

What it lays out are the three main stages of adoption for the new data center, simplified, shared and dynamic. The Clabby analytics paper, also linked from the new data center page or here, puts the three stages in a more consumable practical tabular format.

They are really not new, many of our customers will have discussed these with us many times before. In fact, there’s no coincidence that the new Enterprise Data Center vision was launched the same day as the new IBM Z10 mainframe. We started discussing and talking about these these when I worked for Enterprise Systems in 1999, and we formally laid the groundwork in the on demand strategy in 2003. In fact, I see the Clabby paper has used the on demand operating environment block architecture to illustrate the service patterns. Who’d have guessed.

Simplify: reduce costs for infrastructure, operations and management

Share: for rapid deployment of infrastructure, at any scale

Dynamic: respond to new business requests across the company and beyond

However, the new Enterprise Data Center isn’t based on a mainframe, Z10 or otherwise. It’s about a style of computing, how to build, migrate and exploit a modern data center. Power Systems has some unique functions in both the Share and Dynamic stages, like partition mobility, with lots more to come.

For some further insight into the new data center vision, take a look at the presentation linked off my On a Clear day post from December.