IBM Opens New Cloud Computing Laboratory 66
Rob writes "InfoGrok is reporting that IBM is in the process of opening a new cloud computing laboratory, based out of Singapore. The new lab's primary aim is to help business, government, and research institutions to design, adopt, and reap benefits of cloud technologies. The lab will help IBM's clients deploy first-of-a-kind solutions that increase business responsiveness and performance."
Singapore (Score:5, Insightful)
All the other words in the summary are buzzwords.
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It's possible that the initial draft looked more like this:
New lab's primary initial medium-term strategic and tactical aim is to help small business, medium business, and fortune 500 companies, local, state and national governments, private, government, intergovernmental and quasi-government agencies, groups, working groups, and research laboratories, departments and institutions to plan, scope, design, build, implement, adopt, test, maintain, reuse, integrate, extend, embrace, and reap advantages, benefit
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I wish I could mod you down, yet still post.
"Cloud computing" is quite real; it's an entirely different paradigm involving ephemeral hosts where you monitor and protect roles/functions, and the machines that provide those functions are completely unimportant. It's unlike anything that the industry has ever done, and whether you call it "cloud computing" or something else, it is in fact something different that deserves some different type name, whatever that name may be.
I can't imagine what else in the pos
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But I agree with you. I wish that I could have modded you down.
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"Cloud computing" is quite real; it's an entirely different paradigm involving ephemeral hosts where you monitor and protect roles/functions, and the machines that provide those functions are completely unimportant. It's unlike anything that the industry has ever done, and whether you call it "cloud computing" or something else, it is in fact something different that deserves some different type name, whatever that name may be.
Hardware abstraction is new? Here I was thinking that it was a central theme in computing for pretty sizable chunk of time now.
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reading comprehension has gone WAY downhill lately on slashdot...
I said nothing about hardware abstraction. A VM farm from the 90s that tried to heal and move to another VM isn't the same as having a dozen cheap instances that spin up and down on a whim, with no concern about whether one disappears unexpectedly.
Was it a crazy shock, an unexpected development? No, certainly not. But that doesn't in any way mean that it wasn't a change in the way things there done. I don't know what planet you've been on,
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Probably living on the planet where we actually develop this crap rather than just talk about it, and realize that the only reason for using big words is to try to make people think you are smarter than you really are. Dont try to cast stones when you live in a glass house...
Not to be completely an ass, but your assessment of the situation is laughable. "Cloud Computing" started with SUN micro trying to find a business model, and should have died there. Just think about what IBM is doing... They are crea
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And yes, "cloud computing" is a buzzword about making your product deployments extremely expensive, and about pretending that outsourcing is a great thing.
Since i just moved a company's main revenue source from extremely expensive dedicated servers with minimal fault tolerance, to a self-healing, globally distributed, never-down cluster in the cloud...with substantially cheaper monthly costs and substantially easier maintenance...it's your comments that are laughable.
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I said nothing about hardware abstraction...I don't know what planet you've been on, but 10 years ago on this planet if several of your application servers not only crashed, but completely disappeared never to return again, that would be cause for alarm. Now (due to a coupling of lowered expectations of vendor product quality, thanks to China et. al, and the natural progression of the industry), one just creates the applications with the idea in mind that the roles are what is important, not the devices that may or may not from one moment to the next be fulfilling the roles.
Yup, comprehension sure has gone downhill.
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yes, they have.
If you bother to look at that to which I was replying, and if you have the ability to follow along, you'll get it.
"hardware abstraction" in the sense of VMs running in your company's datacenter stil puts you at being concerned with hardware - it's not abstracted. The vm hosts fail, and no matter how you try to heal the VM clients under them it still takes extra actions...if you're still using the old methods. It's not just the hardware that's changing, after all - it's also the application
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I'll go ahead and pre-empt you, btw.
I no longer need to build a tier4 datacenter, to have tier4-level service. If I run a company with 2 tier4 datacenters, and VM farms in each, not only is it incredibly expensive for me to do it but getting my data to the outside world is incredibly expensive as well.
We're starting to reach a progression in our economy indicating signs of communism - shared resource use. When even Wall Street firms start thinking of making their computing resources available after-hours [slashdot.org]
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I'm riding this wave, too, but from the other side of the table. And Cloud - as an enabler - is bringing fantastic (in a business sense) and fascinating (in a technical sense) technolog
cloud != "VM frontend" or "Hardware Abstraction" (Score:2)
The problem with many people who think it's a buzzword is that they think the "Cloud" is nothing but VM hosting with a marketing label attached to it. As I mentioned elsewhere, where and how the cloud resources arrive is irrelevant; they could be entire servers, they could be VMs, it doesn't matter. That part is completely irrelevant. Getting stuck on the idea of a machine at all is an immediate indicator that someone isn't getting the idea in the first place.
This isn't a progression of VM hosting, it's
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You keep saying it's not hardware abstraction, and then go on to say how cloud computing abstracts the hardware. Whatever, dude; you clearly get a kick out of lecturing people and talking down to them - I'm glad I don't actually have to work with you in real life.
Btw, are you talking about ScyId? I would get some amusement out of you consistently misspelling what you're name dropping, but it's also possible I just don't know what I'm looking for :)
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Cloud computing isn't the fad it was before. It has matured into a tool now that businesses can take advantage of, or just pass by if they so choose.
Businesses are slowly becoming aware that cloud computing isn't the sure thing it was. This seems to happen every decade. In the 1970s, we had dumb terminals. In the 1980s, we had X stations. The 1990s called, wanted their JavaStations back. And cloud computing is just the same, except it works on a higher level where the dumb/thin clients provide the OS,
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Do you by chance work in marketing? BIS graduate? Management?
You speak with the pashion of an advertisement and the vocabulary of someone who memorized the buzzword dictionary but never saw the joke.
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UNIX sysadmin for the last 16, even if my title has changed during that time. I don't do any sales. My passion for it is due to two things:
1) it makes sense, and is a dramatic framework improvement. An increasing user base will force applications to be geared for it better. I don't want to have to do goofy hacks to make things like mysql failover properly. Instead, I want their RDS service to improve enough for me to be able to use it.
2) I'm an environmentalist. It always bothered me that every single
It's interesting that it's some place specific... (Score:3, Interesting)
It's interesting that it's some place specific...
After all, it's a cloud; if they buy into the theory behind it, shouldn't it be possible to deploy the machines pretty much one per datacenter everywhere IBM operates data centers, and build the cloud up that way? Wouldn't the lab be anywhere there was an Internet connection?
-- Terry
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yeah, that's more or less my mark of whether people are getting it (or buying in to it, if you wish to say it that way). If you imagine your "cloud" to be in one specific place...it's not a cloud. The difference between a clouds are dispersed, and cover large areas. They're not merely ponds that happen to be up in the air.
One of my growing list of complaints about Ubuntu is their "cloud" [ubuntu.com] concept, where it's nothing more than a front end to the VMs running in your company datacenter, changing nothing from
And? (Score:5, Insightful)
Is anyone else here thinking: so what? Sounds like a press release with almost nothing of interest.
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This is, after all, Slashdot. Not only does this story make the front page, but will probably generate a ton of comments. Many of them, including this very one that I am posting, complaining about how this is a non-story. I wonder if there is a bit of irony in there somewhere.
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Is anyone else here thinking: so what? Sounds like a press release with almost nothing of interest.
Here's the press release: http://www.ibm.com/news/th/en/2010/05/04/m796788v34229n07.html [ibm.com]
Everything of interest was cut out by "Staff Writer"
If InfoGrok is going to just reprint a cut down press release, they should really say so.
really IBM? (Score:4, Funny)
Cloud computing? What if it rains? All our data will be flowing through the streets!
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cue the naysayers (Score:4, Insightful)
Seems there's a pattern. Internet starts becoming popular: "That's nothing we can't do with our 9600 baud modems..." Facebook becomes popular: "That's nothing we can't do with email..." GUI's become popular, "That's nothing we can't do with a csh prompt..." javascript and flash become popular: "That's nothing we can't do with html..." Windows becomes popular, "That's nothing we can't do on our Sun workstations". The naysayers dissing something is a surefire sign it'll be huge in 5 or 10 years.
Same now with cloud computing. Enough slashdotters dissing it makes me want to invest in it, because if there's one constant, it's that opinion here is a polar opposite of the public at large. Slashdot: "It means nothing!" --> it'll be the next big thing.
There are always people who want things to remain as they always were, so they don't have to ever change or adapt to new things. But time moves on regardless.
Re:cue the naysayers (Score:5, Insightful)
There are always people who want things to remain as they always were, so they don't have to ever change or adapt to new things. But time moves on regardless.
When things change, they don't always get better. For things to get better, they always have to change.
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You are employing a logical fallacy. The results of a previous event do not say anything about how this one will turn out.
By the way: Using Facebook is still an epic failure in all regards, and still makes you into nothing more than a human battery from Matrix. A product. Cattle. And a fucking subhuman to me.
Also: GUI his what? How old are you? Your whole is of “examples” is filled with things where you act like they are obviously true, while they are just using straw-men or are completely false
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Except that in the real world, they often do.
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There's a difference - your examples are concrete technologies.
Cloud computing is a buzz-word for clusters and/or client server systems.
Those are really old hat.
There's reasons why clusters and/or client server systems might grow - mobile devices and faster broadband, as well as new VM and parallel technologies; but I wouldn't back a buzzword that doesn't bring anything new to the table.
You might want to back specific providers (Amazon, Rackspace) who are bringing excellent new products to the market, but t
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I wouldn't back a buzzword that doesn't bring anything new to the table.
Damnmit! I just invested all my monopoly motels in the buzz-market!
Re:cue the naysayers (Score:5, Interesting)
The simple fact is that "cloud computing," as defined by those people selling space on clouds to external clients, is nothing more than a logical evolution of "software as a service". It is, at its core, technology outsourcing. While the term "cloud" connotes an amorphous blob through which data can move freely, the actual mechanics of a cloud are unimportant to the end user. I could be running a "cloud", by this definition, on a big server farm with virtual servers migrating between hardware devices as needed, totally transparent to the user. Or, I could be putting each client on his own dedicated piece of hardware and not including virtualization at all. Either one of these could be called a "cloud" as far as the client is concerned. The whole point of an external cloud is the client doesn't know or care what the underlying technology is or how it works.
The more interesting definition of cloud, to me, is the internal cloud. By this definition, the cloud is explicitly a collection of servers that host multiple virtual machines, which can be moved essentially at will (and even automatically with no input from the operator) as individual virtual machines require more or fewer resources. This type of cloud has also commonly been called a "grid", although grid is another one of those terms with several not-very-well-understood meanings. In this kind of cloud, you optimize the use of compute power while (in theory) reducing administrative overhead. Of course, this depends on a lot of technology that's fairly new and requires a great deal of automation and excellent management software in order to actually make administration easier, and most implementations so far tend to increase, rather than decrease, administration costs. Even so, this type of solution can save a lot of money in terms of hardware, space, and power required to support the IT needs of a business.
I've been deeply involved in developing and implementing internal clouds for a couple of years now, and the technology really does hold a lot of promise. I'm not sold at all on the external Amazon-style clouds as the future of computing, but the "blob of virtual machines" internal cloud seems to hold a lot of promise, especially in larger data center environments.
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To me, one of the best current examples of cloud infrastructure is Google's AppEngine. Not only do I know nothing about the underlying hardware, I also know nothing about virtualization, operating system or anything else. All I know is that I've got an API that defines how I can access it externally, how I can program it (Python or Java) and how I can store data. I don't have to worry abou
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Correct and in that sense, you haven't reduced administrative overhead but it has just increased because now your IT department will have to strategically plan an infrastructure build out. Not only will they have to deal with building out the infrastructure for the bare metal, but also the ever scaling "cloud" portion. You'll have to think large scale. How will they manage thousands of hosts that serve up a couple thousand on top of that, what will the network look like? How about your storage? DHCP, D
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There are always people who want things to remain as they always were, so they don't have to ever change or adapt to new things. But time moves on regardless.
But why are these people all on slashdot? isn't this a geek site?
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There are always people who want things to remain as they always were, so they don't have to ever change or adapt to new things.
Yeah, if only this were a new thing.
Cloud computing == grid computing. Hell, here in Alberta, there was a project to build a large scale grid computing network at least six years ago, and I'm certain the idea predates that. The only difference is cloud computing has brought the idea into the mainstream.
Which really makes the Slashdot naysayers look even sillier. This is an *old
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You may mod me Flamebait, but 99% of all /. users agree with me anyway. Hence it’s not a bait for anyone flaming.
The remaining 1% is PHBs and 4channers who got lost and ended up here. They aren’t relevant anyway.
Don't we already have this with the Internet? (Score:2)
Re:Don't we already have this with the Internet? (Score:4, Interesting)
We had this LONG before the internet ( as we know it ) came into being.
Back then it was called dial up time share or (DUTS).
There is a guy that has a tiny warehouse space and inside it lives an HP-3000 that is as maxed out as he could get it when he purchased it used from Stanford University. Instead of Dial up you connect to it over the net and it runs legacy applications that are still considered to be quite valuable. He makes himself enough money to pay for the bandwidth, the space and the electric bill AND all his hobbies since he retired from, you guessed it, HP.
Press Release (Score:1)
This is about as blatant as it gets here.
Don't disappoint me, slashdot - tell you you've got sumth-sumth for this post.
Thomas Watson is spinning in his grave (Score:5, Interesting)
Advertising masquerading as news (Score:4, Insightful)
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"ephemeral" is still hard to deal with (Score:3, Informative)
I'm currently working out a way to deal with the fact that on EC2, instances disappear, IPs disappear, IPs can't be reallocated for heartbeat situations (no, elastic-ips don't work for that, too slow).
4 options:
1) elastic IP failover
2) dns change (I don't like this since many things don't do lookups after startup, otherwise they'd be horribly slow)
3) the MMM plugin that tries to trick dns resolution changes
4) the special extra I did instead (iptables rewrite of NAT table, which only affects NEW sockets, not ESTABLISHED, etc - meaning whatever is hanging up the first server gets a chance to finish)
I've got #4 working semi-well now, which is great. I have self-healing m1.small spot instances that cost 3 cents an hour, and can keep up large sites. People rag on the m1.smalls, but I get good performance out of them after a few minor tweeks.
In short, "cloud computing" is a very different paradigm than anything the industry has ever seen before, and as a person who has been a UNIX admin/engineer/architech/etc since the early 90's...I'm pretty turned on by the whole thing.
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No it's the natural incremental evolution of mainframe/supercomputer time sharing with a catchy new name. The paradigm shift occured at least half a century ago when computers moved from single user purpose built machines to general purpose time share machines where resources were rented to users.
Since that time pretty much all of computing has been about how to efficiently abstract and share the
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The paradigm shift occured at least half a century ago when computers moved from single user purpose built machines to general purpose time share machines where resources were rented to users.
Prior to 50 years ago, computers were only for personal use?
Listen, I know it's fun to be contrary, but you didn't respond to what I actually wrote at all. It's not a paradigm shift because we're sharing resources, it's a shift because the machines themselves no longer matter. I am still having to remind people cons
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Yes, that's called hardware abstraction. The data center can be considered as a single machine that can allocate storage and processing resources as required, wich is exactly what time sharing on mainframes was designed to do.
"It's a completely different set of problems and solutions, due to being a different environment"
No it's the same problem (resourc
Buzzword complement (Score:2)
Distributed computing was around for years. Someone decides to call it "Grid computing". Nope.. Not sexy enough. Someone calls it "Cloud" and it takes off.
Winning definition from Stackoverflow was:
"Cloud Computing. n. Yet another buzzword for services on the internet to trigger silicon valley VC's 'NextBigThing(R)' reflex, thus attracting some money which otherwise be spent on a new yacht."
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1349894/difference-between-cloud-computing-and-distributed-computing [stackoverflow.com]
clouddot?
hmmm...
If there's money to be made... (Score:1)
Cloud of obscurity (Score:2)
What IBM meant to say was that with the obscurity provided by The Cloud, more resources can be moved out of the US and somewhere, anywhere, where they can get a better tax and salary deal. The Cloud IBM is referring to is not the cloud of cloud computing, it the Cloud of Global Management where resources can be shifted to the area of Least Responsibility.