The first general session is Jim Rymarczyk, IBM Fellow and Chief Virtualization Technologist on Smarter Business Solutions Through Dynamic Infrastructure:
“In these difficult economic times, IT leaders are re-evaluating their one-server-per-application strategy and looking for new solutions to help increase responsiveness, scalability, and agility while reducing energy costs and improving resource utilization. IBM’s new Dynamic Infrastructure vision and evolutionary approach can help customers achieve these objectives through the implementation of virtualized IT environments. Learn why virtualization is an essential IT investment today, how its role and benefits will grow in the future, and why it will be vital in implementing the dynamic infrastructure required for smarter business solutions.”
Wow, slide snafu, giving the talk sans-slides. The talk (no longer presentation) is on expanding role of virtualization.
IT today is at breaking point, cost of managing IT has grown significantly, resiliency and security are becoming more important. Rate and pace of innovation is accelerating. Not just interesting innovation, but things you need to employ. SOA and service management certainly, but also comprehensive virtualization. Virtualization is mandatory, not just for infrastructure cost, but also for management costs, reducing the cost of IT.
Four predictors, IT getting more difficult:
1. Number of systems getting deployed is increasing, won’t decrease, even with economic downturn
2. Diversity of IT environment. IT will always be heterogeneous. Even clouds will be diverse, with need to interact.
3. Coupling of elements in IT environment. All applications are highly multi-tiered, interconnected system of applications.
4. Virtualization itself – introducing virtualization introduces complexity – impacts all software processes – metering, licensing, etc.
How do we get out of this difficult situation? Right now, people using virtualization for hardware benefits. Two advances down the road, pooling of resources to form a single system from management viewpoint. Factor of thousands reduction in resource management.
Two, all resources will become virtual resource objects. Have state and metadata. These objects will be greatly valuable, will be able to attack software management and costs.
New business – virtual resource objects – appliances. This is the second wave of functionality. Software doesn’t exist yet. Standards aren’t there yet. Haven’t begun to see innovation yet to unfold.
Virtualization is underpinning of cloud computing: on-demand scale up and down, decouple software stacks from underlying hardware.
What does it take to deliver virtualization. Big portion is stack of management software. Service management layers.
Taking Q&A
Q. Compare cloud computing to utility computing? Will IT services ever get to utility?
A. Thinks so. Levels at which you can do cloud computing – Infrastructure can do as utility. Next level up, platform as a service. Third tier, applications themselves. Each tier sub-dividable.
Q. Customers hesitant about deploying business critical, 1000 person call center application, to cloud. Do you see that?
A. Jim sees that as well with customers. Speaks about internal compute clouds (private clouds).
Q. Follow-on, customers budget by line-of-business. How would you fund an internal private cloud?
A. Forcing function is economics. Give people choices as to how they spend money.
Q. Follow-on, what’s the difference between private cloud and mainframe.
A. Jim, mainframe is very mature technology, solved many of these problems. [Is not advocating replacing a mainframe with a cloud; sounds like if you have a mainframe, you should keep using it]
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