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.
The concept of workload mobility came up again recently in a discussion about the network requirements required to achieve that vision. My colleague Doug Gourlay recently posted several observations of what exactly networking in the cloud represents--and doesn't represent. In that discussion, he makes the following observation about the role of bandwidth in moving compute workloads around the Internet:
It's not all big pipes. I know, I wish the world were all 10Gb Ethernet too. I also wish I had 100Gb here today so we didn't have to focus so much on elegant link-bundling technologies. (this is a major area of network improvement in general in my opinion by the way, and may be worth another blog post on how to improve these...) Video is neat - it drives 5-10Mb/s, 15Mb/s for a big Telepresence. But moving a virtual-machine from one place to another may move up to 40GB of data, or 320Gb (sic). This would mean that in the course of an hour each VM movement is equal to about six concurrent TelePresence sessions in network demand. Compound this with VM sprawl, Dynamic Resource Scheduling, and data center consolidation and yes, there will be a heck of a lot of data moving between servers, between data centers, and with cloud computing from enterprises to service providers.
More than bandwidth though, which we can make the case for, how will the data move? Does the Internet itself have enough bandwidth and traffic management to support this data movement? And how will the addressing statefully move from one autonomous system to another? How will the security policy bound to a particular object (re: VM) stay consistent and coherent as the VM moves across the network and from one network to another. This is the longer term problem much more so than just the bandwidth issue, and one that is not currently being served by the hype-machines.
His observation about the immense bandwidth required to meet an open cloud with free workload mobility is a very interesting one. The live motion you know today typically bypasses moving data by leveraging shared network storage which is attached to a given VM regardless of which host it lands on.
The future is a bit different, however.
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There has been significant discussion over the short life of the term "cloud computing" about how little it differs from concepts like managed hosting and ASPs. And there is some truth to these observations; if you really look closely, what are the key differences between EC2 and a more traditional managed hosting provider? Some would say multi-tenancy, self-service and pay-per-use (including billing and elastic capacity). With specific regard to EC2, I would tend to agree.
(I would also hasten to point out that Amazon provides some very PaaS-like services in conjunction with EC2, such as Simple Queuing Service (SQS) and SimpleDB.)
However, if this is the great "paradigm shift" of cloud computing, as offered by smart people like Krishnan Subramanian of CloudAve, then let me offer that these basic extensions to existing hosting models will be peanuts next to a shift that will create one of the most significant market opportunities since the explosive growth of the Internet itself. I'm not dealing in hyperbole here; I honestly believe that there is a clear evolutionary step to the cloud occurring well after stand-alone self-service clouds are mainstream (which they arguably are today) that will inspire massive innovation.
That game changing technology disruption will be the federation of disparate clouds, and the distribution of software, data and billing across commercial and private cloud boundaries. In other words, the introduction of secure, reliable workload mobility in an extension of the Internet itself--an "Intercloud", so to speak.
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