IBM Research and SAP Demonstrate New Cloud Technology

[prakashseth]

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In a joint demonstration at CeBIT, IBM and SAP previewed a technology that enables the live migration of SAP applications across remote IBM POWER6 systems via cloud computing.

The technology, developed as a part of the European Union-fundedRESERVOIR cloud computing project, is designed to provide companies with a range of cloud computing solutions to meet their specific business needs.

Cloud computing is an emerging approach to shared infrastructure in which large pools of systems are linked together to provide IT services. This approach to delivering and consuming IT provides answers to the challenges many businesses face today: the immense complexity of sprawling data centers, the growing cost of energy, and the need to dynamically adapt the allocation of IT resources to constantly changing workloads and business priorities.

In this technology demonstration, IBM and SAP show how users can run enterprise applications in the cloud, in particular demonstrating the migration of workloads across physical servers and across data centers. This demonstration is another instance of IBM working with partners across the IT industry to gain insights about creating and configuring workloads, and help companies move to the clouds as smoothly as possible.

"The breakthrough we're showing today is that applications can flexibly move across remote physical servers, regardless of location -- which makes our work a strong enabling technology for the cloud," explained Dr. Joachim Schaper, VP EMEA of SAP Research. "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."

"With RESERVOIR, our aim is to provide cloud technologies that will enable energy-efficient, borderless delivery of IT services that are driven by actual demands -- with the goal of keeping costs competitive," said Dr. Yaron Wolfsthal, senior manager for system technologies at IBM's Research Lab in Haifa, Israel, where the technology was developed. "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 under-utilized servers (and possibly entire data centers) when demand drops, and powering on idle servers when load increases."

In this demonstration, the migration of SAP workloads across the cloud is supported by IBM's POWER6 systems, which enable users to run separate applications on different virtual machines, called logical partitions, on the same physical server. The IBM POWER6 system's Live Partition Mobility capability further allows for the movement of a partition from one POWER6-based server to another POWER6-based server in the data center with no application downtime, resulting in better system utilization, improved application availability, and energy savings.

The collaborative research relationship between SAP and IBM began in 1999 and has since developed a rich portfolio of research activities. On a quarterly basis, research management and key researchers from both organizations meet to identify topics of mutual interest and to leverage the open collaborative research model, including the EU-sponsored FP7 program, in order to define new project areas that will lead to exciting new research results. Besides cloud computing, key areas of interest are business process management, services science and engineering, model-driven software development, and security and compliance.

RESERVOIR is an IBM-led joint research initiative of 13 European partners to develop technologies that help automate the fluctuating demand for IT resources in a cloud computing environment. The 17M Euro EU-funded initiative, called RESERVOIR -- Resources and Services Virtualization without Barriers -- explores the deployment and management of IT services across different administrative domains, IT platforms and geographies. This cloud computing project aims to develop technologies to support a service-based online economy, where resources and services are transparently provisioned and managed.

[mauricio]

Cloud is an emerging style of Information Technology infrastructure designed for rapid delivery of computing resources. Business or consumer services are delivered in a simplified manner, providing unbounded scale, differentiated quality, and with a user focus designed to foster rapid innovation and efficient decision making.Cloud computing is a potentially cost-efficient model for provisioning processes, applications and services while making IT management easier and more responsive to the needs of the business. These services - computation services, storage services, networking services, whatever is needed - are delivered and made available in a simplified way - "on demand" regardless of where the user is or the type of device they're using. It's this approach that enables both rapid innovation and support of core business functions. New applications are made available by highly efficient virtualized compute resources that can be rapidly scaled up and down in a flexible yet secure way to deliver a high quality of service.IBM can help you move to a dynamic infrastructure, enabling you to deliver cloud services, whether in your own enterprise, or as one of the growing number of cloud service providers. Cloud computing helps improve service delivery by applying engineering discipline and economies of scale in an Internet inspired architecture. Standardizing systems and software components can help reduce operating expenses, and virtualizing the cloud environment to pool the IT resources help reduce the capital expense of hardware, software and facilities. In addition, service management capabilities are critical for dynamically provisioning, managing and securing resources within the cloud. Addressing these challenges in a cloud environment is key to reduce infrastructure costs, while still meeting the dynamic needs of the business.

[TAARIQ]

Hello I Have Heards About the Terms Such as Public and Private Clouds Related to This topic What it Can you please provide Some more infor about it Thanks

[Andrew]

Originally Posted by TAARIQ

Hello I Have Heards About the Terms Such as Public and Private Clouds Related to This topic What it Can you please provide Some more infor about it Thanks

Public and Private Clouds
Often depicted as being available to users from a third party provider, "public" clouds are typically made available via the Internet and may be free or inexpensive to use. There are many examples of these types of clouds, providing services across open, public networks today.

One example is Amazon Web Services, where IBM has made available new Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) at no charge for development and test purposes, enabling software developers to quickly build preproduction applications based on IBM software within the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) environment. The new development AMIs can be accessed by visiting the new IBM Cloud Computing for developers.

"Private" clouds offer many of the same benefits as "public" clouds but are managed within the organization. These types of clouds are not burdened by network bandwidth and availability issues or potential security exposures that may be associated with public clouds. Private clouds can offer the provider and user greater control, security and resilience.

Many companies are beginning to both offer and implement cloud computing capabilities. IBM's approach, unique differentiation and focus on cloud computing infrastructure, architecture and information management are designed to help you achieve better results, faster.