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Toward the On Demand World with IBM’s Dr. Irving Wladawsky-Berger
How On Demand and availability fit together.
Key’s July 15 Webinar explored IBM’s view of the future and showed ways to prepare for it. Dr. Irving Wladawsky-Berger, VP of Strategy for IBM and their chief platform futurist, weighed in on how IBM sees the coming world of On Demand and how that will affect IT today. Paul Adams, President and CEO at SteelEye Technology, discussed how availability strategies tie to On Demand. Finally, Lief Morin, President of Key, tied the whole new world of On Demand computing to what is happening in most IT shops today.
To view a recording of this and all past KEY webinars, go to: http://www.keyinfo.com/resources/web_arch.htm.
A summary follows.
IBM’s Dr. Wladawsky-Berger started out by describing three critical areas of advancing technology driving IT today:
1. The Internet is advancing at all levels: B2B, B2C and wireless.
2. Base computer technology (processors, memory, storage) is advancing at the lowest levels to provide more power at less cost (32-bit and 64-bit microprocessors are imbedded in a wide variety of consumer products, and both storage and processors are scalable at unimaginable levels).
3. Software computing models are changing to be more flexible and quick-reacting than ever before.
Dr. Wladawsky-Berger noted that we have transitioned from a traditional computer world, to an Internet world, and finally to an On Demand world of rich modular components to meet IT needs more quickly.
On Demand computing, a key part of IBM’s strategy articulated and developed by Dr Wladawsky-Berger, leverages information at a wide variety of levels for business. It permits optimizing processes at the enterprise level and at an industry network level. On Demand permits small and smaller businesses to link to information available to larger businesses, putting them on a level playing field.
Dr. Wladawsky-Berger defined the operating environment of the coming On Demand world as having four essential aspects:
1. Flexibility and integration with open standards provided through WebSphere, DB2, and Lotus Workplace release 2.0.
2. Incredibly robust IT structure including very strong security and higher levels of reliability.
3. A simpler IT that’s manageable by human beings; driven by the push to server consolidation, storage consolidation and virtualization.
4. A drive to IT automation, where the system must monitor everything, and is self-promoting, self-optimizing, self-availability configuring, and self-healing.
On Demand will eventually become the major new paradigm and permeate everything, just as IT is getting to the point that it must work all the time.
Paul Adams, President and CEO at SteelEye Technology (www.steeleye.com), an availability solution provider with a mission of eliminating the high cost of IT downtime, knows a lot about implementing the kind of highly resilient environments that On Demand requires. SteelEye provides fault tolerant solutions for Linux and Wintel servers for up to five 9s. Paul reviews actual situations illustrating how availability and resiliency can be built into a variety of computing scenarios. These scenarios and all slides from all the speakers can be viewed as part of this webinar archived on Key's website (see link below).
Lief Morin, President of Key and webinar host, said that IT is adopting the On Demand world where changing demands on server and storage capacity can be met on the fly. High availability, backup/recovery, storage and server management are specific managed solutions available today that are needed for the On Demand world. The ability to flexibly provide financing for all resources used in an On Demand world is a new requirement being met by Key. So is the ability to flexibly handle licenses for the additional resources that can be added in an On Demand environment whenever required.
More practical advice about how to prepare for the On Demand world is contained in the archived webinar that can be found at: http://www.keyinfo.com/resources/web_arch.htm.
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