The Wisdom of Clouds

IBM launched late Monday a new portfolio of products and services for the enterprise cloud computing market, which the company claims builds on lessons learned from earlier cloud initiatives.

Targeted at providing standardized platforms for specific computing workloads, the products and services, launched under the Smart Business and IBM CloudBurst monikers, aim to change the way IT organizations build and deliver IT services.

"Cloud is an important new consumption and delivery model for IT and business services. Large enterprises want our help to capitalize on what this model offers in a way that is safe, reliable, and efficient for business," Erich Clementi, general manager of enterprise initiatives at IBM, said in a statement. "Today's Smart Business announcement demonstrates that we take this responsibility seriously with cloud investment and solutions targeting the early opportunity."

I spoke with Dennis Quan, director of autonomic computing at IBM, and asked him to break the announcement down with a little more detail. Quan started by noting that IBM has been pursuing cloud and autonomic computing initiatives for some time now and that these initiatives have taught the company lessons that were invaluable in developing Smart Business.

"For instance," said Quan, "new workloads like large-scale business analytics and information processing are driving new specialized approaches to computing."

Quan noted that standardizing these approaches, through automation and service management, is critical to meeting new IT demands.

Initially, IBM is focusing on two core workload types in the Smart Business offerings: development/test and virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI). According to Quan, the company will expand the list of workload offerings over the coming months and years.

Quan highlighted three delivery models for Smart Business cloud products and services:

• Public cloud. IBM will provide its Smart Business portfolio as software services delivered directly from its IBM Cloud data centers located around the world.

• Private cloud services. For Smart Business workloads, customers can engage IBM Global Services to assist them in building cloud computing infrastructures within their own data centers.

• CloudBurst private cloud infrastructure. Initially only available for development/test workloads, IBM will offer a 42U data center rack of pre-installed and configured hardware and software as a "drop-in" private cloud option.

Data Center Knowledge had some more details about the CloudBurst rack:

The basic CloudBurst package includes:

• 1 42U rack
• 1 BladeCenter Chassis
• 1 3650M2 Management Server, 8 cores, 24GB RAM
• 1 HS22 CloudBurst Management Blade, 8 cores, 48GB RAM
• 3 managed HS22 blades, 8 cores, 48GB RAM
• DS3400 FC attached storage
• IBM CloudBurst service management pack
• IBM Tivoli Provisioning Manager v7.1
• IBM Tivoli Monitoring v6.2.1
• IBM Systems Director 6.1.1 with Active Energy Manager; IBM ToolsCenter 1.0; IBM DS Storage Manager for DS4000 v10.36; LSI SMI-S provider for DS3400
• VMware VirtualCenter 2.5 U4; VMware ESXi 3.5 U4 hypervisor

James Staten, principal analyst at Forrester Research, told me that IBM has an advantage here.

"IBM came to these solutions from a point of credibility based on conversations they started over a year ago," said Staten. "Many other systems vendors haven't done that, and it could hurt them in the long term."

Staten also noted, however, that IBM has chosen to handle the public cloud elements of Smart Business entirely on its own, choosing to compete with service providers rather than partner with them. This could put IBM into direct competition with some large customers, such as telecommunications companies and large hosting providers, according to Staten.

The Smart Business services are available now, while the IBM CloudBurst system will ship Friday.

IBM, Microsoft, Cisco, Intel, the IEEE/ISTO, and key members of the Cloud Computing Interoperability Forum met recently to address how they could work with the community to drive cloud computing markets and technologies forward. Jesse Silver, one of the CCIF's four co-creators, spoke to me after the meeting, and Reuven Cohen released a single paragraph of minutes on his blog Tuesday morning:

Yesterday representatives of CCIF, CloudCamp, Cisco, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, and the IEEE-ISTO met while attending the Cloud Computing Expo in New York. Other companies were invited but were unable to attend, generally due to the short notice. The companies agreed on a shared goal to promote use and awareness of open and interoperable cloud computing. The group brainstormed several ideas including the possibility to build on the momentum created by CloudCamp. Another topic was the ability to enable participants, from individuals and companies, both large and small, to be able to contribute to and use the results of broad community collaboration. Additionally, the possibility of a trade association or marketing association for cloud computing was discussed but no specific actions were agreed. The final topic was the need to have broader participation from the community in this discussion.

Jesse noted the conversation was extremely civil, and that each participant contributed positively to the discussion. That alone is great news to me. The atmosphere of the meeting was a key indicator to me about the likelihood that we could build open cloud standards in a cooperative, rather than competitive, fashion.

There are not a lot of details to be had about the specifics of the conversation, though it was clear that no company was willing to make any firm commitment to a specific action at this time. Just the willingness to both open future conversation to the general community and to support the organization needed to make a community targeted and productive is a great start, however.

Circumstances behind the release of the Open Cloud Manifesto on Monday morning--which was promoted by IBM and rejected very publicly by Microsoft--were not discussed. Jesse made it clear that both companies have clearly decided to put the incident behind them.

Now attention turns to Reuven's upcoming keynote at the Cloud Computing Expo, and the CCIF meeting to be held there on Thursday night. If the community embraces both the need for a trade organization and the open process proposed to establish and run it, then this may have been a very important meeting. If not, it will be another sign that the Web 2.0 era has dramatically effected industry organization and standards development.

Either way, the meeting itself signaled the acknowledgment by big business of the power of the cloud computing community. That alone is history in the making.

Update: Almost immediately after I posted this, I came across another cloud alliance that was organized to explore cloud security, thanks to Chris Hoff. Is there an opportunity here for some cooperation between the two communities (interoperability and security) moving forward?

Updated to include links to Opencloudmanifesto.org.

As widely discussed since Wednesday night's leak of its existence, the Open Cloud Manifesto--originally authored by IBM--has been released for public consumption.

This had been a difficult weekend for the document, first outed by Microsoft's Steven Martin and then leaked in its entirety by my Overcast co-host, Geva Perry, the next day.

The discussion of the document has been muted, in part because the document is not a standards declaration or contract attached to any action or entity. Instead, it serves as a simple statement of principles that almost any cloud participant would agree with--at least publicly. However, the process in which it was brought into existence has been debated ferociously and may signify a changing of the guard in the standards world.

What is perhaps more interesting, however, is the list of signatories to the document. The list below is official as of Monday morning, according to my contact at IBM:

IBM
Sun Microsystems
VMWare
AT&T
Telefonica
Cisco Systems
EMC
SAP
Advanced Micro Devices
Elastra
rPath
Juniper Networks
Red Hat
Hyperic
Akamai
Novell
Sogeti
Rackspace
RightScale
GoGrid
Aptana
CastIron
EngineYard
Eclipse
SOASTA
F5
LongJump
NC State
Enomaly
Nirvanix
OMG
Computer Science Corp.
Boomi
Reservoir
Appistry
Heroku

Note that the "big four" of cloud computing, Amazon.com, Microsoft, Google and Salesforce.com, are not signatories. However, several major players are on it, including my employer, Cisco--as well as EMC, Sun, VMware, and a host of key start-ups and established vendors throughout the industry.

There is a Cloud Computing Interoperability Forum meeting scheduled to be held Monday night in conjunction with Cloud Expo in New York City in which many, if not all of the signatories, and several that refused to sign (including Microsoft) will gather to talk about the future of cloud standards.

This could either be a historic meeting--or the final nail in the Manifestogate coffin.

The document itself is available on Scribd, or as a PDF from the official Opencloudmanifesto.org site or Perry's Thinking Out Cloud blog.

Cloud computing is the first major IT market disruption that has taken place in the world of open source software, "the wisdom of crowds" and the community collaboration revolution of Web 2.0. The concept of the cloud is trying to grow and evolve in an atmosphere in which technologists expect input on the technology they are being asked to rely on, and IT management expects input on the strategies they are being asked to adopt.

Never has that fact been more evident then in the events that have taken place over the last two days. The leaking of the Open Cloud Manifesto is a life lesson in the way that things will never be the same again.

To recap, the buzz began Wednesday night when Microsoft's Steve Martin intentionally leaked the existence of a diatribe created originally by IBM--an Open Cloud Manifesto. The industry proclamation is being supported by a laundry list of cloud service providers and members of the Cloud Computing Interoperability Forum. You can read the document on my Overcast co-host's Geva Perry's Thinking Out Cloud blog.

Since that leak, there has been a steady flow of news, retorts and excited commentary. Remember, the manifesto hasn't even been officially announced yet (look for that news to break on Monday morning)--so everything you've read so far has been pretty much who isn't participating and why.

Let me disclose right now that I was not involved in the creation of the document, nor in planning for its release, but I have been fully briefed through my employer, Cisco Systems, and the CCIF and have read the document. I planned to post my thoughts along with the others on Monday morning, and I'll still cover it in some depth at that time. For now, though, I just want to explore what I learned the last two days. (Just a quick reminder that the opinions expressed here are entirely my own, and not my employers.)

1. It's an opinion piece, not a standards proposal.

   As several people have noted, this is a big deal about something that doesn't set anything in stone, either technically or legally.

2. Those who have publicly stated that they won't sign have the most to lose.

   Microsoft and Amazon are the two cloud powerhouses that have publicly declared they will not sign the document at this time. Amazon has a huge existing install base that most other IaaS providers would like a piece of, and Microsoft is trying to hold on to an exceedingly large customer base of its own. Why should either agree to work on top-down standards to threaten that?

3. It's probably a bad idea to release even an industry opinion piece without public commentary.

   IBM, et al, left the door open for Microsoft to label the entire effort as "closed" by trying to rush to a declaration of success without allowing any public community or industry input whatsoever. Big mistake, in my opinion, because open source software has changed the game forever for technical initiatives.

   If the drivers of this initiative had simply announced that the Manifiesto draft was agreed to by the same list of companies, but was open for public commentary before being finalized, the Microsoft post would have looked silly. In fact, there is still time to declare exactly that.

4. It's what follows that is important here.

   The most important quote from the day, for me, is the following from one of the CNET reports:

   That said, Martin said Microsoft would like to be a part of the dialogue. He noted that the company was subsequently invited to a meeting of some cloud-computing participants to take place on Monday as part of a cloud-computing conference.

   "We have accepted that invitation and we will participate," Martin said. "If there is meaningful dialogue, it is something we will want to play a role in. Hopefully we will use that as a chance to restart that conversation."

   The productiveness of that meeting (and, I'm guessing, the civility) will say a lot about what will come of the manifesto. Its great that a large number of companies have (apparently) signed on to express their commitment to open cloud environments, but the actual actions initiated at that meeting--including organization, financial/people commitment, etc.--will go a long way to establishing what they can accomplished.

That being said, let me also note that I'm not convinced that a top-down formal standards approach will do anything other than repeat the mixed success of the WS-* efforts to date. Amazon's EC2 and S3 APIs are already defacto standards (see EUCALYPTUS and Sun's Cloud Compute Service), and Sun and GoGrid have also opened up their APIs in the hope they take some or all of the management standards pie. Already, businesses are out there figuring out some basic interoperability between cloud providers that matter to them: RightScale and their competitors are attacking server image portability in interesting ways, and Salesforce.com has full integration from Force.com to Amazon AWS and Facebook.

So, in the end, this declaration is a good thing in that it shows that the industry has learned that open is good. However, in the end it might not do much more than that, and we might have all gotten into a tizzy over yet another expression of what could be in cloud computing.

The clouds seem to be revolving around the Sun today.

As CNET reported earlier, Sun Microsystems has announced the Sun Cloud Compute Service to attendees of their CommunityOne developer event. In short, Sun is following through on its promise of delivering a cloud infrastructure service, initially targeting developers, students, and start-ups.

What I love about this announcement is how well it leverages Sun's extensive cloud-computing DNA. Open source/open APIs, a focus on developers, great use of Sun hardware and software assets--it's all there. In fact, I have to give Lew Tucker, Sun's CTO of cloud computing, and his team credit for being among the first to assemble a cloud offering from scratch that I think will really appeal to developers.

The service revolves around the concept of creating Virtual Data Centers (VDCs), a concept already made popular by 3TERA, VMWare, and others. The idea is that you go to the Sun Cloud, create an account, create one or more VDCs, and use the VDC to allocate servers, storage, IP addresses, network services, etc., as required to build an infrastructure for whatever your purpose may be.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the entire offering to me is the API sets offered. Tim Bray offers some detail, but the API itself is available under the Creative Commons "Attribution" license. It's a well-thought-out API set, true to Sun's ethos of "engineering for engineers, by engineers."

For example, storage will run with WebDAV and the Amazon AWS S3 API, both phenomenal standards to choose if ease of integration into existing applications and management tools is your goal.

The compute side will leverage a REST API that returns JSON containing information including links to sub-components of the requested resource. As Tim explains:

To use the API, you need one URI to get started; it identifies the whole cloud. Dereference that, you get some JSON that has URIs for your VDCs (Virtual Data Centers); deference those, and you get more JSON that represents your clusters and servers and networks and so on. This has the nice side-effect that the API doesn't constrain the design of the URI space at all.

What Tim means in that last sentence is that Sun can extend the API easily to include any new resource types or services that Sun may want to add to the offering. Nice.

But can they deliver?
I would rhapsodize about how well Sun hit the sweet spot, if it were not for a couple of things working against them. First, the Amazon Web Services APIs are slowly becoming the de-facto standard for cloud infrastructure APIs. EUCALYPTUS, the academic "build your own cloud" infrastructure uses them. What's more, the Cloud Computing Interoperability Forum is reportedly working on an Amazon compatible API, and even Sun capitulated to the S3 API.

GoGrid is also promoting its API under the Creative Commons Attribution license.

However, Sun's strong engineering and marketing muscle gives it a chance here, and I would remain highly optimistic if not for the other huge piece of news today: IBM is reportedly in talks with Sun to acquire the data center stalwart for $6.5 billion dollars.

As ZDNet's Larry Dignan notes in his coverage, a deal like this one is long overdue:

The companies mesh on the open-source software front, Sun is struggling, and IBM can consolidate some server market share.

Now, IBM loves open source, and loves the developer community just as much as Sun. But Big Blue already has a cloud strategy in place. It is incredibly uncertain what, if anything, will happen with the existing Sun Cloud Compute Service were such an acquisition to happen.

It is conceivable that IBM would keep the service running. On the other hand, IBM engineers have plenty of skin in the cloud game as well, and it is unclear whether a brand new Sun offering could survive a political battle were an acquisition to happen. The good news is that the Sun API is already in the open, so others that choose to implement it would likely be protected from any legal harm. Further development of the API, on the other hand, is far from assured in this scenario.

In the end, the success of Sun's endeavor will likely depend on two things: what any given acquirer decides is right for its cloud business, and the rate of adoption for the nascent Sun Cloud Compute Service offering. Rapid adoption could make it difficult for IBM or anyone else to change the market's mind.

Still, it's a brilliant offering on paper. Let's hope that brilliance makes it to the market before it gets dulled down or snuffed out all together.

At CeBit, IBM and SAP today are announcing a ground-breaking technology demonstration in which SAP applications were moved live between IBM Power6 servers running in remote locations.

The technology, developed as a part of the European Union's Reservoir project, is targeted at service providers and enterprises that wish to use workload mobility to enhance performance and quality of service.

According to Yaron Wolfsthal, senior manager for system technologies at IBM's Research Lab in Haifa, Israel, this technology is aimed at providing the Reservoir participants with "energy-efficient, borderless delivery of IT services that are driven by actual demands":

"The new technology is allowing us to realize the vision of true cloud computing by moving applications across disparate interconnected networks to optimize load balancing across remote servers.

When changes in workload occur, the new technology autonomically balances resource utilization and power consumption across remote servers. This is done, for example, by evacuating and turning off underutilized servers (and possibly entire data centers) when demand drops, and powering on idle servers when load increases."

Joachim Schaper, vice president in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa of SAP Research, explained that the research team sees the technology as "a strong enabling technology for the cloud":

"Specifically, in cloud-scale environments, service providers will need to provide users with access to services across the cloud. Service providers will need to compete on performance and quality of service--and so the future cloud will need to support application mobility across disparate data centers to enhance performance."

There were few details about the specific technologies that enabled the demonstration, though IBM's Power6-based servers and AIX operating system were called out as critical elements. Specifically, IBM's Live Partition Mobility, which allows an AIX logical partition to be moved live from one server to another, played a central role. That technology is currently limited to systems within a single data center.

As I've noted in the past, workload mobility remains one of the most heavily anticipated future benefits of standardized cloud-computing environments. Promising to enable a truly elastic online marketplace of information technology services--increasingly known as "the Intercloud"--technologies like the one IBM previewed Tuesday promise to revolutionize both the cost and the capabilities of cloud computing for enterprises and consumers worldwide.

In addition to IBM, VMware has announced work toward workload mobility across data centers through its VCloud initiative, and the Cloud Computing Interoperability Forum is looking at similar technologies.

First, a mea culpa. Last night I commented on Gordon Haff's analysis of the Tivoli announcements from IBM Pulse, the company's big service management conference in Las Vegas this week. I wrote the bulk of that post much earlier in the day, and stand by its contents as it applies to those specific items. However, I should have looked one more time at my Google Reader, as there was much, much more to the IBM announcement. This post is a review of that announcement as a whole.

Oh, and all comments on any of my posts are my own opinion. They do not necessarily reflect the opinions or positions of my employer, Cisco Systems.

IBM greatly strengthened its position in the world of cloud computing this week. What IBM announced, if you haven't seen it already, is a laundry list of product and service enhancements and extensions aimed at meeting the needs of cloud computing customers. Most of the announcement was more of the same point products and global services offerings we have come to know and love from IBM, and I commented on them last night.

The heart of the announcement, however, was a partnership with Juniper Networks to "demonstrate how a hybrid cloud could allow enterprises to seamlessly extend their private clouds to remote servers in a secure public cloud..." This is the announcement I have been looking for from IBM.

Update: This post covers the Tivoli specific announcements that Gordon Haff covered in the post referred below. IBM made significant, additional announcements after this post was written, which I cover in a separate post.

I looked forward with great anticipation to Gordon Haff's post on Monday covering the Tivoli announcements at IBM's Pulse conference.

Specifically, I was especially interested in what Tivoli was going to offer to support dynamic infrastructure, in part because IBM's cloud DNA holds so much promise, and I have yet to see any magic from them.

As would be expected from Pulse, the bulk of the announcements are geared toward service management. From Gordon's post:

• IBM service management software and services from IBM Global Business Services, IBM Global Technology Services, and specialized IBM Business Partner capabilities. Together, they enable organizations to design and implement IT systems that centrally manage and monitor an entire industry infrastructure, enabling greater performance of both traditional assets, such as manufacturing robotic equipment, as well as emerging technologies like "smart meters" and RFID (radio frequency identification).
• A new governance-consulting practice. Through the practice, IBM works with clients to design governance systems to help mitigate risks related to business changes, changing market conditions, and regulatory requirements.
• New Tivoli Service Automation Manager software, which automates the design, deployment, and management of services such as middleware, applications, hardware, and networks, tasks that today are largely done manually and thus are subject to error, time constraints, and other human limitations.
• New Tivoli Key Lifecycle Manager software, which helps organizations simplify the life cycle of encryption keys by enabling them to centralize, automate, and strengthen security through key management processes, with an increasing number of IT infrastructure elements having built in encryption to protect them.

Ugh.