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."
Re:cue the naysayers (Score:3, Informative)
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 the cloud "industry" as a whole sounds like a lot of vaporware.
"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.
Re:And? (Score:3, Informative)
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.