Why Combine Platform Computing with IBM?

You may have read the news that Platform Computing has signed a definitive agreement to be acquired by IBM and you may wonder why. I’d like to share with you our thinking at Platform and what our relevance is to you and the dramatic evolution of enterprise computing. Even though not an old man yet and usually too busy doing stuff, for once I will try to look at the past, present and future.

After the first two generations of IT architecture, centralized mainframe and networked client/server, IT has finally advanced to its third generation architecture of (true) distributed computing. An unlimited number of resource components, such as servers, storage devices and interconnects, are glued together by a layer of management software to form a logically centralized system – call it virtual mainframe, cluster, grid, cloud, or whatever you want. The users don’t really care where the “server” is, as long as they can access application services – probably over a wireless connection. Oh, they also want those services to be inexpensive and preferably on a pay-for-use basis. Like a master athlete making the most challenging routines look so easy, such a simple computing model actually calls for a sophisticated distributed computing architecture. Users’ priorities and budgets differ, apps’ resource demands fluctuate, and the types of hardware they need vary. So, the management software for such a system needs to be able to integrate whatever resources, morph them dynamically to fit each app’s needs, arbitrate amongst competing apps’ demands, and deliver IT as a service as cost effectively as possible. This idea gave birth to commodity clusters, enterprise grids, and now cloud. This has been the vision of Platform Computing since we began 19 years ago.

Just as client/server took 20 years to mature into the mainstream, clusters and grids have taken 20 years, and cloud for general business apps is still just emerging. Two areas have been leading the way: HPC/technical computing followed by Internet services. It’s no accident that Platform Computing was founded in 1992 by Jingwen Wang and I, two renegade Computer Science professors with no business experience or even interest. We wanted to translate ‘80s distributed operating systems research into cluster and grid management products. That’s when the lowly x86 servers were becoming powerful enough to do the big proprietary servers’ job, especially if a bunch of them banded together to form a cluster, and later on an enterprise grid with multiple clusters. One system for all apps, shared with order. Initially, we talked to all the major systems vendors to transfer university research results to them, but there was no taker. So, we decided to practice what we preached. We have been growing and profitable all these 19 years with no external funding. Using clusters and grids, we replaced a supercomputer at Pratt & Whitney to run 10 times more Boeing 777 jet engine simulations, and we supported CERN to process insane amounts of data looking for God’s Particle. While the propeller heads were having fun, enterprises in financial services, manufacturing, pharmaceuticals, oil & gas, electronics, and the entertainment industries turned to these low cost, massively parallel systems to design better products and devise more clever services. To make money, they compute. To out-compete, they out-compute.

The second area adopting clusters, grids and cloud, following HPC/technical computing, is Internet services. By the early 2000s, business at Amazon and Google was going gangbusters, yet they wanted a more cost effective and infinitely scalable system versus buying expensive proprietary systems. They developed their own management software to lash together x86 servers running Linux. They even developed their own middleware, such as MapReduce for processing massive amounts of “unstructured” data.

This brings us to the present day and the pending acquisition of Platform by IBM. Over the last 19 years, Platform has developed a set of distributed middleware and workload and resource management software to run apps on clusters and grids. To keep leading our customers forward, we have extended our software to private cloud management for more types of apps, including Web services, MapReduce and all kinds of analytics. We want to do for enterprises what Google did for themselves, by delivering the management software that glues together whatever hardware resources and applications these enterprises use for production. In other words, Google computing for the enterprise. Platform Computing.

So, it’s all about apps (or IaaS J). Old apps going distributed, new apps built as distributed. Platform’s 19 years of profitable growth has been fueled by delivering value to more and more types of apps for more and more customers. Platform has continued to invest in product innovation and customer services.

The foundation of this acquisition is the ever expanding technical computing market going mainstream. IDC has been tracking this technical computing systems market segment at $14B, or 20% of the overall systems market. It is growing at 8%/year, or twice the growth rate of servers overall. Both IDC and users also point out that the biggest bottleneck to wider adoption is the complexity of clusters and grids, and thus the escalating needs for middleware and management software to hide all the moving parts and just deliver IT as a service. You see, it’s well worth paying a little for management software to get the most out of your hardware. Platform has a single mission: to rapidly deliver effective distributed computing management software to the enterprise. On our own, especially in the early days when going was tough, we have been doing a pretty good job for some enterprises in some parts of the world. But, we are only 536 heroes. Combined with IBM, we can get to all the enterprises worldwide. We have helped our customers to run their businesses better, faster, cheaper. After 19 years, IBM convinced us that there can also be a “better, faster, cheaper” way to help more customers and to grow our business. As they say, it’s all about leverage and scale.

We all have to grow up, including the propeller heads. Some visionary users will continue to buy the pieces of hardware and software to lash together their own systems. Most enterprises expect to get whole systems ready to run their apps, but they don’t want to be tied down to proprietary systems and vendors. They want choices. Heterogeneity is the norm rather than exception. Platform’s management software delivers the capabilities they want while enabling their choices of hardware, OS and apps. 

IBM’s Systems and Technology Group wants to remain a systems business, not a hardware business nor a parts business. Therefore, IBM’s renewed emphasis is on systems software in its own right. IBM and Platform, the two complementary market leaders in technical computing systems and management software respectively, are coming together to provide overall market leadership and help customers to do more cost effective computing. In IBM speak, it’s smarter systems for smarter computing enabling a Smarter Planet. Not smarter people. Just normal people doing smarter things supported by smarter systems.

Now that I hopefully have you convinced that we at Platform are not nuts coming together with IBM, we hope to show you that Platform’s products and technologies have legs to go beyond clusters and grids. After all, HPC/technical computing has always been a fountainhead of new technology innovation feeding into the mainstream. Distributed computing as a new IT architecture is one such example. Our newer products for private cloud management, Platform ISF, and for unstructured data analytics, Platform MapReduce, are showing some early promise, even awards, followed by revenue. 

IBM expects Platform to operate as a coherent business unit within its Systems and Technology Group. We got some promises from folks at IBM. We will accelerate our investments and growth. We will deliver on our product roadmaps. We will continue to provide our industry-best support and services. We will work even harder to add value to our partners, including IBM’s competitors. We want to make new friends while keeping the old, for one is silver while the other is gold. We might even get to keep our brand name. After all, distributed computing needs a platform, and there is only one Platform Computing. We are an optimistic bunch. We want to deliver to you the best of both worlds – you know what I mean. Give us a chance to show you what we can do for you tomorrow. Our customers and partners have journeyed with Platform all these years and have not regretted it. We are grateful to them eternally.

So, with a pile of approvals, Platform Computing as a standalone company may come to an end, but the journey continues to clusters, grids, clouds, or whatever you want to call the future. The prelude is drawing to a close, and the symphony is about to start. We want you to join us at this show.

Thank you for listening.

ISC cloud 2011

The European conference concerning the intersection between cloud computing and HPC has just finished, and it's very pleasing to report that this conference delivered considerable helpings of useful and exciting information on the topic.

Though cloud computing and HPC have tended to stay separated, the HPC community starting with the sc2010 conference, interest has been gaining primarily because access to additional temporary resource is very temping. However, other reasons for HPC users and architects to evaluate the viability of cloud include total cost of ownership comparisons, and startup businesses which may need temporary access to HPC but do not have the capital to purchase dedicated infrastructure.

Conclusions varied from presenter to presenter, tough some things were generally agreed upon:

1. if using Amazon EC2, HPC applications must use the cluster compute instance to achieve comparable performance to local clusters.
2. fine grained MPI applications are not well suited to the cloud simply because none of the major vendors offer infiniband or other low latency interconnect on the back end
3. running long term in the cloud, even with favorable pricing agreements is much more expensive than running in local data centers, as long as those data centers already exist. (no one presented a cost analysis which included the datacenter build costs as an amortized cost of doing HPC.)
   

Another interesting trend was the different points of view depending on where the presenter came from. Generally, researchers from national labs had the point of view that cloud computing was not comparable to their in-house supercomputers and was not a viable alternative for them. Also, compared to the scale of their in-house systems, the resources available from Amazon or others were seen as quite limited.

Conversely, presenters from industry had the opposite point of view (notably a presentation given by Guillaume Alleon from EADS). Their much more modest requirements seemed to map much better into the available cloud infrastructure and the conclusion was positive for cloud being a capable alternative to in-house HPC.

Perhaps this is another aspect of the disparity between capability and capacity HPC computing. One maps well into the cloud, the other doesn't.

Overall it was a very useful two days. My only regret was not being able to present Platform's view on HPC cloud. See my next blog for some technologies to keep an eye on for overcoming cloud adoption barriers. Also, if anyone is interested in HPC and the cloud, this was the best and richest content event I've ever attended. Highly recommended.

Congratulations to Rick Parker – a Platform Customer, Partner and SuperNova Semifinalist!

Over the past year, I’ve had the pleasure of working closely with someone I regard as a true visionary when it comes to IT management and unlocking the power of private cloud computing. I am referring to Rick Parker who, until recently, has been the IT Director at Fetch Technologies, a longtime customer of Platform Computing, which leverages Platform ISF for their private cloud management. Now I am proud to now call Rick by a new name: Protostar! From a pool of more than 70 applicants, Rick was recognized in Constellation Research’s SuperNova Awards among an elite group of semifinalists that have overcome the odds in successfully applying cloud computing technologies within their organizations.

Most award programs recognize technology suppliers for advancements in the market.  Few programs recognize individuals for their courage in battling the odds to affect change in their organizations.  The Constellation SuperNova Awards celebrate the explorers and pioneers who successfully put new technologies to work and the leaders that have created disruptions in their market. Rick fits the bill perfectly, and an all-star cast of judges (including Larry Dignan at ZDNET and Frank Scavo at Constellation - to name a couple) have agreed. The award recognized applicants who embody the human spirit to innovate, overcome adversity, and successfully deliver market changing approaches.  

Here is an excerpt from the award nomination to give you a peek into Rick’s story of implementing cloud computing at Fetch (with a little help from Platform Computing solutions!).

Since joining Fetch, Rick has successfully implemented a dynamic, nearly completely virtualized data center leveraging private clouds and Platform Computing’s ISF cloud management solution. Rick’s journey originally began with a simple idea: to build the perfect data center that moved IT away from the business of server management and toward true data center management. As part of this vision, Rick founded Bedouin Networks to create one of the first, if not the first, public cloud services in 2006 and deliver radically improved cost effectiveness and reliability in data center design.

In 2007, Rick carried his passion for disruptive data centers with him when he joined Fetch Technologies. Fetch Technologies is a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) provider that enables organizations to extract, aggregate and use real-time information from websites and, as such, depends on its ability to maximize data center resources, efficiently and effectively. At any given moment, Rick and his IT team can get a call to provision more compute resources for Fetch’s fast-growing customer base. Before using Platform ISF, Fetch provisioned resources manually to increase SaaS capacity, which usually took several hours of personnel time per server. The cost effectiveness of Rick’s innovative design not only made Fetch’s products and services more profitable, it made them possible. The expenditure that would have been required for the hundreds of physical servers, networking, and data center costs to enable the additional capacity required could have exceeded the potential revenue.

A Protostar

Rick has been a vital asset to the Fetch team and an incredible partner to the Platform Computing team over the years. We congratulate him on this latest recognition and wish him the best of luck in his newest adventure – in search of more disruption – in his new position as Cloud Architect at Activision. We look forward to working with Rick on his next private cloud adventure. Congratulations, Protostar!

VMworld Signage - "Are You Cloud Intense?"

VMworld always attracts some interesting booth strategies and signage.  We were highlighted as being one of the most innovative with our "Are you Cloud Intense?" theme on our shirts and booth imagery.

Show Your Cloud Intensity

I'm not sure we are philosophers, but we definitely know how to help customers build private clouds with IaaS management software!

Best of VMworld Award for Private Cloud Management

One of the fun elements at VMworld is participating in the “Best of VMworld” awards.  Platform Computing entered the Private Cloud Management category against 15+ vendors.  After several web meetings, live demos and reference reviews, we were awarded the Finalist position.  

Best of VMworld 2011 Private Cloud

This award follows other recent successes such as being named the #1 private cloud vendor by Forrester Research.  Customers want a trusted vendor that has proven themselves in large-scale, enterprise environments, and one that has been around for a few years.  Companies just don't want to trust their data centers to a startup with an uncertain future.  There is just too much at-risk.   

Platform team celebrates the win at VMworld!

Our private cloud / IaaS management solution, called Platform ISF, was cited for the following key differentiators:

• Cloud in a cloud in a cloud – ability to support multiple hierarchical organizational structures with nested virtual private clouds for business units, groups, projects, etc.
• Physical deployment – includes native capability to do bare metal physical provisioning all the way to complex multi-tier application structures
• Application-centric framework – IT services are captured as standardized applications or application components that are multi-tiered, virtual and physical, private and public cloud, etc.
• Automated provisioning of VMware – deep integration that maintains investment in VMware with automatic discovery, import (all or partial), synchronization, and simplification of provisioning VMware environments
• Multi-hypervisor with KVM and Xen – adds a management layer similar to vCenter on top of KVM / Xen to normalize capabilities across hypervisors
• Integration with P2V (physical to virtual) – support for multiple provisioning tools plus a Platform native option to support the ongoing transition of more applications and workloads to virtual environments
• Managing resource pools on DRS clusters – adding control over resource pools on DRS clusters with end user self-service management aligned to hierarchical account management
• Policy management - depth and breadth of policy management capabilities for both initial placement and operational service level agreements (SLAs) such as flexing up and down
• One solution – Platform ISF is an integrated set of IaaS management capabilities that span self-service, billing, automation, etc. versus requiring multiple solutions from different vendors that require stitching together

Which of these are important in your environment?

Top 5 VMworld 2011 Takeaways for Private Cloud

4 days.  115 degrees outside.  20,000 of my closest virtualization friends.  VMworld Las Vegas was quite an experience.  The Platform Computing booth was busy from start to finish with a demo of our award-winning Platform ISF private cloud (IaaS) management solution.  

From attending the keynotes and speaking with attendees, I had 5 key takeaways from the event:

1.       Private cloud is at a tipping point

Gone are the days of having to start every conversation by explaining the difference between virtualization and private cloud.  Of course this is a self-selected group but the education level has dramatically increased.  We had many people stopping by to discuss their private cloud initiatives and how to get started.

2.       VMware licensing has upset many

The new vSphere 5 licensing has caused many companies to reevaluate their dependency on VMware.  The recent price increases had disrupted their planning and created additional fears about being locked in to a costly hypervisor (vCloud = vLockIn).  VMware management tools manage VMware ESXi hypervisor--and that's it.  There is a real fear of being locked into a specific stack and/or being required to upgrade to more expensive packages with lots of unnecessary functionality.

3.       Multi-hypervisor is real

Even before the price increase, users have been evaluating a mixed hypervisor strategy.  A common discussion is VMware’s closed support at the management layers.  VMware is viewed as the gold standard when considering virtualizing production applications.  End users already have or are seriously considering adding KVM (Platform is a member of the Open Virtualization Alliance) and to a lesser extend Xen into their roadmaps for non-production use cases (for example dev and test).  These offer great density at lower cost.

4.       The rise of application-centric thinking

In the early days of private clouds, most of the focus was on the transient IT services such as an OS or VM.  Typical end users were developers needing access to standardized IT environments.  Most of our conversations included discussions about additional levels of an application stack – including the middleware, application logic, and post-provisioning scripting.  In summary, an application-centric private cloud.  By standardizing IT service definitions to include these levels and automating delivery, companies can effectively define their own PaaS.  While we position Platform ISF primarily as IaaS management, many of our customers think we are selling the solution short.  Customers are using it to define and provision their own PaaS and SaaS applications.  Ironically this was a major focus of VMware’s messaging, albeit in a hosted PaaS environment.  Most of our larger enterprise customers want to tightly integrate their on-premise data center infrastructure and security systems into an on-premise personalized PaaS. 

5.       Physical is part of cloud

When one thinks cloud, the natural mental model = virtualization.  However, I was surprised by the number of conversations where end users want to add integrated physical provisioning.  Sometimes the focus was for standalone bare metal provisioning.  But as we move more towards an application-framework, there are components in the app stack such as the database server that might only exist on a physical system for scalability and performance.  Operating within this mixed environment is a core requirement to deal with both non-production transient IT services as well as production apps with flexing and stringent service level agreements (SLA).

At Platform Computing, we are not cloud washing our products.  On top of being named the #1 vendor by Forrester, we received the Best of VMworld Finalist award for Private Cloud Management.

Were you there?  What were your takeaways?

Forrester Evaluates Private Cloud Vendors – Platform Tops Media Scoring

Given all the discussion around cloud software, one would have thought a comprehensive analysis of vendors would have been published by now. However, Forrester Research just released the first quantitative analysis of the private cloud vendor marketplace entitled “Market Overview: Private Cloud Solutions, Q2 2011.” The market overview examines the landscape of vendors providing solutions designed to accelerate the implementation of an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud in a customer’s data center.

Complimentary Full Copy of the Report

The report is significant as the first ‘apples-to-apples” comparison of vendors using customer references, a compulsory 30 minute demonstration and written responses. Only 15 vendors were able to meet this initial hurdle, suggesting a number of vendors where marketing far outstrips reality. Vendors were scored 0-4 across 10 criteria. Forrester did not add up the scores but the media quickly did the sub-analysis and published a ranking table. The result: Platform Computing received the most points.

Source: SYS-CON Media

The # 2 vendor was VMware and we congratulate them on their effort. Given that one of the key report findings is to “prepare for islands of hypervisors” – meaning an increase in the need to support other hypervisors such as KVM and Xen -- companies should pause to reconsider locking into a single hypervisor vendor. Cloud is much more than VM. Also, be careful about pricing models that penalize your ability to utilize your cloud environment more efficiently (i.e., per VM versus per server).

Read the Platform Computing press release

Another interesting point was discussed by the report’s author, James Staten, in his blog. Mr. Staten cautions readers to evaluate vendors on their specific requirements. We totally agree.

First, in the report, an attempt is made to catalog vendors based upon their origins, e.g., enterprise systems management vendors versus pure-play cloud solutions, etc. Our belief is that regardless of origins, customers should choose a vendor with a comprehensive technology footprint, solid customer base, strong financials, and global support system. Claiming you are # 1 among pure-play or grid vendors is meaningless and an artificial distinction. At the end of the day, one wants the best solution to solving a set of problems. Period.

Second, Mr. Staten recommends looking differently at either software-only versus ‘physical compute and storage included’ vendors. If you take those points away from HP, IBM, Dell, Microsoft, and BMC, the Platform lead just grows. And if you want an appliance, Platform has partners that offer a complete pre-integrated solution today.

Finally, the report recommends a strategy of trying before you buy. Since a private cloud project involves both technology and process change, we recommend running a proof-of-concept (POC) to gain buy-in from end user communities and different business units. A POC can also help validate assumptions against your business case for justifying the value of a private cloud.

Resources

• Learn more about Platform's private cloud solution here
• Download the Platform ISF product here
• Schedule a discovery session with one of our cloud consultants by contacting us at privatecloud@platform.com.

Are there any criteria that you would have added to the evaluation?

Private Cloud at State Street

There is nothing better than a real world customer case study to explain the value of deploying a product. Cut through the marketing and explain:

1. The underlying problem / pain points
2. The vendor selection process
3. Key decisions and lesson learned
4. Actual value being achieved

At the recent Wall Street & Technology Capital Markets Cloud Symposium, the Chief Infrastructure Architect from State Street, Kevin Sullivan, discussed how cloud – specifically private cloud – is being rolled out across 20+ projects.

For more details about Mr. Sullivan's presentation, there is a great article in Advanced Trading magazine by Phil Albinus. Mr. Albinus provides details about the decision making process, key vendors, and next steps. To learn more about Platform Computing's cloud solution, please visit our private cloud solution area.

Some additional metrics that were discussed include:

• Started in 2009
• Went from 400 to 150 use cases
• Operated a 6 month proof-of-concept (POC)
• Down-selected from 150 technology partners to a ‘handful’
• Provisioning has been reduced from 8 weeks to hours
  
• Unique Active-Active two data center configuration for 100% app high availability

One of the four key elements to the State Street cloud environment is the ‘cloud controller’. In their environment, the cloud controller manages self-service, configurations, provisioning, and automation of the application construction within the infrastructure. A key benefit for the developers was the ability to get access to more self-service capacity on-demand much faster. This easily outweighed any cultural concerns regarding not being able to specify to the n-th degree an IT environment request. If needed, IT could still request ‘custom’ but it would take longer.

In addition, Mr. Sullivan highlighted several key design principles driving the design, building, and management of the cloud:

• Simplification – creating of standards, consolidation, and self-service
• Automation – for deployment, metrics, elasticity, and monitoring
• Leverage – commodity hardware and software stack with a focus on reuse of the platform, services, and data

The benefits and successes of private cloud at State Street are becoming increasingly known as their CIO Christopher Perretta is fond of discussing the topic. Some additional resources to learn more about the State Street cloud project are:

• State Street Cloud Strategy at Waters Technology
• Building A Secure Cloud at Bank Systems and Technology
• Modernizing with Cloud and Linux Technologies at ComputerWorld
• State Street Aims For Cloud at Advanced Trading

What do you think can be learned from State Street’s successes?

Not to burst your bubble…

Probably everyone who has ever been in an HPC environment as a user has run into resource constraints. Limitations like hardware, licenses, memory, or maybe even GPUs on hybrid compute engines rank at the high end of the limitations most users face are facing today. The problem comes when you run into these limitations in the middle of running a job. What do you do then? “Hitting the stops,” so to speak, will often cause another procurement cycle and consume lots of resources in terms of analysis, internal meetings, planning, as well as the purchase and deployment phases before any additional real work can get completed.

Cloud computing, or in this case, cloud bursting offers an approach to mitigate the process and limitations that most HPC consumer corporations go through today. Certainly, using resources outside the firewall can have its own challenges for corporate users, but those aren’t the focus of this blog.

Assume for a moment that security, licensing, provisioning latency and data access are not a problem. Of course, they’re all major issues that need to be addressed to make a cloud solution usable, but bear with me. There are still some important questions that need to be answered:

• What are the appropriate conditions to start up and provision cloud infrastructure?
• What jobs should be sent to the cloud once that infrastructure is provisioned and which should stay local and wait?

This second question is the focus here. Often in science, the hardest part of solving a tough problem is stating the question properly. In this case, the question is nicely represented by the below inequality where each entity represents a factor of elapsed time. For cloud computing to be advantageous from a performance perspective,

(Data upload to cloud) + (Cloud Pend time) + (Cloud Run time) + (Data download from cloud) < (Local Pend time) + (Local Run time)

Such a statement allows us to draw a few conclusions about the conditions for when cloud bursting is advantageous for the HPC user:

• When local job pend time estimates for a job get very large
• When local elapsed run time is large -- A corollary to this condition is that if the job can be parallelized, but there are insufficient resources locally to run the job quickly, then cloud bursting the job may return results to the user sooner than allowing the job to run on insufficient resources locally.
• When the job’s data transfer requirements into and out of the cloud are small

Additionally to those conditions, we start to see where several of the real challenges are for a scheduler to make the right decision about which jobs get sent to the cloud and which don’t. For instance, most schedulers today do not consider the data volume associated with a job. But, in a cloud scenario, the data transfer times associated could be 2-50x the runtime for a job and not only dependent upon the file size, but the available transfer bandwidth. Schedulers will need to evolve on several levels to tackle this challenge:

• Allow users to indicate the files (both input and output) required for each job.
• Estimate pending and run time for disparate infrastructures
• Estimate the run time for jobs which run parallel

Be on the lookout for solutions from Platform Computing that start to address exactly these challenges.

Supercomputing goes commercial in China

Just having come back from the HPC China Conference in Beijing two weeks ago where TianHe 1A was announced, I am now packing for SC’10 in New Orleans.

For those of you unfamiliar with TianHe 1A, it is currently the world’s fastest supercomputer capable of computing 2.507 petaflops, or 2,507 trillion calculations per second. TianHe 1A, together with Nebulae (the word’s second fastest supercomputer according to the July 2010 TOP500) will be hosted in government funded supercomputing centers in China. However, unlike many other countries where the top systems are almost exclusively running code for research, supercomputing centers in China will be running like commercial companies to sell computing capacity to industries and research firms. Their model center, the Shanghai Supercomputing Center (#24 on July 2010 TOP500) has about 300 customers and keeps full capacity operations 24x7. As the result, those big systems will run more commercial code than the systems in national labs. Such commercialized operations will demand high software quality and strong local support.

The recently launched Platform HPC matches needs like these very well. With a complete management solution with a leading MPI implementation, Platform HPC brings performance and productivity to production environments. It provides all the necessary components to manage large systems including user web portal, application integrations, resource allocation and job scheduling, cluster management and monitoring, and job usage accounting. Most importantly, it is supported by a single vendor to dramatically decrease troubleshooting time.

I’m looking forward to seeing how such HPC cloud model on top systems shakes the future of HPC community.

SIBOS off and running

With SIBOS kicking into high gear this week, it’s hard not to think about the significant changes that have gone on in the banking industry over the past few years. The most obvious reflection of this lies in the key themes of the conference. The idea of ‘rebuilding trust’ addresses how banks can tackle the conflict between reducing risk and bringing down cost while ‘recovery’ looks at leveraging technology to innovate and capitalize on the improving climate. ‘Regulation’ also tops the agenda and will no doubt remain a C-level priority for many years to come.

Tying all of these themes together is the role of technology in helping organizations overcome the obstacles they face. After all, data proliferation, and the need to better manage it, is at the root of many challenges being faced by financial institutions today. For example, our recent survey found that 66% of buy-side firms and 56% of sell-side firms are grappling with siloed data sources.

Looking at some of our recent work, it is interesting to see how financial services firms are trying to tackle these areas. SepSvenska Handelsbanken is using high-performance computing to run core applications for trading and risk management. New regulations around risk in Sweden are leading to more risk scenarios which need to be run so more compute power allows the bank to plan ahead much more easily. Other financial institutions including Citigroup are also running similar projects.

As the event continues through the week, it will be interesting to see the different ways financial organizations are tackling these challenges. Hopefully, we will finally begin to see an end to the stormy crisis clouds and a sunny future shining though.

By Jeff Hong, CFA
Director of Financial Services Industry Marketing
Platform Computing

Innovation in the cloud

During his recent speech at London School of Economics Steve Ballmer said "The cloud will open a whole new range of opportunities to use computing in more valuable ways. There are new applications that you couldn't have built in a world without the cloud."

Cloud really is sparking innovation and the promise of innovation in the cloud is a driver for adoption. This year we conducted a study around the uptake of cloud technology and found that while improving efficiency was the main motivator in 2009 (41%), the 2010 survey reveals that drivers for deploying private cloud included experimenting with cloud (19%).

Private cloud is a good home for test and development because as it offers a flexible, cost effective and safe environment to operate in. We recently wrote about a test and development cloud, this type of private cloud deployment provides a self-service test and development infrastructure.

Not only does cloud offer a platform for innovation, but as Ballmer states it also frees up resources by allowing executives time to innovate.

In order to make the most of the cloud it’s essential to approach a migration to cloud carefully. A phrase we like to use is “A cloud is built not bought” and as with all good constructions; comprehensive plans, firm foundations and the right materials are the essential building blocks.

Private clouds are likely to continue to outpace public cloud models and I expect the increase in private cloud adoption to be matched by an increase in innovation.