Harvard Medical School makes Platform’s Honor Roll – wins InfoWorld 100 & Computerworld’s Premier 100 IT Leaders Awards

Before I get caught up in the fray of 2010, I wanted to take a moment and recognize one of our valued customers here at Platform – Harvard Medical School (HMS). Harvard Medical School’s deployments for their internal cloud and HPC backbone—powered by Platform—were recently recognized by InfoWorld magazine for its innovation and use of technology to advance their business. In addition, Dr. Marcos Athanasoulis, director of information technology at HMS, was recognized as one of Computerworld magazine’s Premier 100 IT Leaders for 2009. For those of you that have been in the technology business for a while, you’ll recognize that both the InfoWorld 100 and Computerworld’s Premier 100 IT Leaders awards are two of the most prestigious awards given each year within the technology sector.

We’re thrilled that HMS and Dr. Athanasoulis have both been recognized by two such influential awards programs and that Platform could play a part in their recognition. Here’s an excerpt from the winning InfoWorld 100 nomination form to give you a sense of why HMS won these awards:

“Since 2002, Dr. Athanasoulis has understood that high performance computing is the heart of scientific discovery. Challenged with a large and dispersed group of research teams and scientists with irregular but often large computational workloads, Dr. Athanasoulis had a vision to build a cutting-edge private cloud environment. HMS needed an evolved, dynamic grid infrastructure where compute resources are always available for the more than 500 Harvard researchers across the world who run complex data calculations in their quest to find cures for cancer, decipher gene and protein sequences and alleviate suffering caused by disease.

To evolve HMS’ centralized IT services organization to a highly-scalable, cost-effective, self-service solution required a lot of determination and persuasive skill on behalf of Dr. Athanasoulis to influence a cultural shift among research lab directors to overcome the initial skepticism around resource assurance and allocation on a shared infrastructure. However, once the project was implemented, scientists soon noticed that the internal grid, which serves as the backbone for HMS’s internal cloud, offers a great deal of flexibility and reliability. The new infrastructure, utilizing Platform LSF, IBM hardware, Isilon and EMC storage solutions along with various biomedical software solutions such as MatLab and SAS, offers both scalability and workload distribution, created a system of shared computing resources that can process large, complex calculations in a fraction of time that a single computer would take.

With Platform LSF, HMS is able to move scientific computations “closer” to the data to reduce latency and resource consumption, thereby saving HMS’s IT budget and resources. And as future compute demands spike, compute capacity can be sourced from a public cloud, which will be integrated with HMS’s internal cloud to provide unlimited, on-demand resources on a pay-per-use basis. The economies of scale and efficiencies that are achieved with a shared infrastructure increase research lab productivity and collaboration, while significantly reducing infrastructure costs.”

Given the success HMS experienced building its internal cloud, we wanted to share the story and recognize the great leadership of Dr. Marcos Athanasoulis!

Congratulations, and thank you, Harvard Medical School and Dr. Athanasoulis!

To learn more about Harvard Medical’s Platform deployment, case study can be found here.

Beyond Virtualization

Wednesday we had an excellent discussion with Cheryl Doninger, R&D Director at SAS and William Fellows, Principal Analyst at the 451 Group about the benefits of getting beyond virtualization.

Cheryl presented 4 use cases on where private cloud management can improve the end-user experience while reducing costs. The cases included: test/dev, IT operations, SAS customer deployments and SAS on-demand hosting.

Wil discussed why organizations are looking beyond VM management in considering private clouds and gave several financial services customer examples as he characterized the state of the market.

I discussed how Platform ISF is being used for enterprise and HPC applications respectively through two case examples.

You can view the presentations and discussion at: http://www.platform.com/eforums/eforum.asp?1-1KP4BZ

Where will the push for cloud come from?

I recently had an interesting email discussion with a couple of my fellow colleagues here at Platform as well as Randy Bias, the CEO of CloudScaling, about what we think will be some of the primary drivers for private clouds in the enterprise. Not surprisingly, we predict that within many organizations the push to adopt cloud resources will split along departmental lines between business users and the IT department. Although buy-in from both sides of the organization will be necessary to make clouds successful, we believe that it will ultimately be the users—consumers of the cloud, if you will—that will drive its success. Here’s why…

Cloud computing is ultimately a business model change, not a technology change. It’s a huge shift in how IT departments are meant to operate—by giving users “self-service” IT and the ability to choose what resources they need and when they need them. In effect, private clouds are meant to decentralize the power of the IT department without taking away their control of the department’s overall resources and budget. Ideally, a cloud infrastructure should help IT departments have greater control over the resources they purchase and deploy and provide for greater reuse of IT resources across the board. It should also give users the power to access those resources when needed.

In many organizations the IT department and business departments function separately or, sometimes, even at cross purposes. The IT department is often perceived as being too slow and cumbersome to get things done—and with many departments being forced to function with lesser budgets these days, this is often true—they’re too busy and don’t have the resources necessary to make the kind of changes necessary to implement cloud infrastructures. Business users, on the other hand, tend to have more urgency around the projects they’re working on and usually are the ones within the organization pushing the envelope to get things done and driving the kind of business agility and speed that cloud computing offers.

I’ve observed this happening already with public cloud use. When business users perceive their IT departments to be a roadblock to getting their work done, a user will just pull out a credit card, buy some compute or storage time and charge it on their expense report—never to be seen by the IT department. Users get access to what they need in minutes, not weeks, and they don’t need to wade through a request system and queue to get it.

Of course, I’m not advocating that business users “go rogue” and skirt their IT departments to get things done – a lot of harm can result from this, both politically and from an infrastructure standpoint. But business- and action-driven needs may ultimately trump the old-ways of IT provisioning where IT doles out usage without user access. As private clouds continue to evolve, it may be that IT purchases and builds the private cloud, but the consumers of the cloud will determine its success.

We’re currently working on a whitepaper that addresses all these issues along with both the hard and soft ROI that such a model will deliver to both business and IT. Look for more on the ROI factor to come in the whitepaper and in this blog soon.

-Phil Morris, CTO of the HPC BU, Platform Computing

The Private Cloud - Beyond Virtualization Webcast

I’ve spoken to several of our Platform customers and prospects that are either planning on building a private cloud or are in the early deployment phases and noticed that certain questions and concerns repeatedly come up about the role of virtualization in private clouds. The questions that come up most frequently include thing such as:”Is virtualization necessary for the cloud? How can I integrate my physical and virtual machines in the cloud? Can I deploy a cloud using just virtualization?”

As a result of my customer conversations, we’ve put together a webinar to discuss these issues. We’ve gathered William Fellows, Principal Analyst with The 451 Group and Cheryl Doninger, R&D Director at SAS Institute, for a panel discussion titled “The Private Cloud – Beyond Virtualization” to address these questions and concerns. William will provide an analyst perspective on the key elements and methodologies that need to be considered when deploying private clouds and Cheryl will discuss the SAS Institute’s implementation of a private cloud and how Platform ISF helps SAS’ R&D department to bring new products to market faster and more cost effectively.

Please join me on Wednesday, December 16 at 11:00 a.m. Eastern for an in-depth look at why virtualization is just the first step in deploying a private cloud, what the specific deployment stages are and how organizations can benefit from the increased efficiency and reduced costs of private clouds.

To register, please visit:
http://www.platform.com/go/2009/platformisf/webcast.asp

Insights from the Gartner Data Center Conference

I wanted to share some key thoughts from the recently completed Gartner Data Center conference. I had the chance to attend many of the sessions focused on cloud computing, and had several 1:1 sessions with the leading Gartner analysts covering Virtualization, Cloud, and Automation. It is difficult to boil down 4 very long days of sessions, meetings and discussions, but I wanted to share four key points that really caught my eye.

1. Cloud moved from 14th in 2009 to 2nd in terms of CIO priorities based on a Gartner survey. This is an amazing change in a short time period and speaks to the increased interest and focus that many organizations have on cloud. (My guess is few IT technologies or concepts have moved this far this fast.) This rapid acceleration in interest is consistent with the increased activity we see with our customers, looking to determine their overall cloud strategy, while looking for immediate opportunities to get started and get moving. Organizations need to start now on their cloud strategies..while also keeping an eye on the longer term architectural impacts and choices.
2. Business Intelligence is moving from rear view to a forward looking focus: (from Carl Claunch Keynote). This shift to more analytics and more proactive analysis indicates an increasing need for organizations to “out compute” their competitors to accelerate the pace of their business. We continue to see this as many organizations increase the size of their HPC/Grid environments..and look to a private cloud model to enable their users to tap into the compute capacity that lies dormant and underutilized within their organizations.
3. A Caution: 1/3 of startups in the management space disappear every 2 years (from Cloud Management Session). As CIO’s look to their emerging #2 priority (see point #1) it is very important they consider who and what type of companies they partner with to enable the evolution from siloed to shared cloud infrastructure. A balance between innovation and the ability of these software partners to deliver over the long haul is key for a large enterprise to consider.
4. DISA Private Cloud End User session: ¾ of the Battle in Building a private cloud is Cultural. We have seen this time and time again over our 15+ year history as our HPC and Grid customer base has evolved and adopted their large scale shared compute environments. Many organizations have deployed and adopted key technology components that enable them to build an automated, virtualized, cloud infrastructure. What they have struggled with is the political/cultural side of sharing, getting their end users and business unit customers, comfortable with a dynamic shared infrastructure. Our experience in helping customers make this journey is clearly relevant to helping enterprise users make a similar journey into the cloud.

Overall another very good Gartner event clearly indicating the increased interest and importance large enterprise organizations are placing on defining their cloud strategy and the issues/challenges they face on their road to building their next generation IT infrastructure in a cloud model.