Emerging Computing Infrastructures Foretell a Bright Future – Virtually

Continuing advances in all aspects of information technology, including virtualization, web 2.0 social/business communities and highly scalable server grids are driving the emergence of powerful IT infrastructures that will increase the numbers of consumer and business services by several orders of magnitude, revealed Jeffrey M. Birnbaum, Managing Director, Chief Technology Architect and Global Head of Architecture and Engineering, Merrill Lynch and Dr. Tom Bradicich, IBM Fellow and VP Systems Technology, IBM Corporation at the SIFMA workshop “Emerging Computing Infrastructures – Supply Side and Demand Side Perspectives” Wednesday afternoon.

This increase in services will be accompanied by very large growth rates in digital data, resulting in unprecedented volumes to be accessed, analyzed, and acted upon. New and emerging virtual IT infrastructures are generally built with standard computing and storage components - hundreds of thousands going to millions – and will connect to billions of user devices, sensors and existing IT infrastructures and other types of platforms.

First up for discussion was networking. Firms are comfortable with how their applications and systems behave with multiple 100Mb and 1Gb Ethernet interfaces. But it isn’t enough and a single network interface per machine would simplify maintenance and operational risk. New 10Gb Ethernet (discussed as Fibre Channel over Ethernet) will stress your processor(s) in new ways as the TCP/IP stack is exercised trying to keep up with the data. Enhancements to the protocol and drivers including priority “pause”, kernel bypass (a favorite of the presenter) and zero copy among others will enable increase of CPU utilization and general I/O throughput. The presenters were adamant that one should think beyond current limitations and that investing in one’s network should be a primary goal and is a necessity for success.

The concept of “stateless computing” was discussed – a misnomer as there is “state” but it is stored remotely rather within the typical local environment. In stateless computing, the local network computer downloads the operating system and applications over the improved network thus simplifying administration and upgrades of software. This form of distributed computer management is in use in other sectors and is just making its way into the financial services industry.Virtualization – including cloud computing and a new concept of “ensembles” – have matured and will be the fabric of future datacenters. The triumvirate of servers, storage, and networking will be abstracted alike atop a hypervisor with extensible partitions providing plugins for management, I/O enhancements, and security services among other capabilities. The ensemble of virtualized services can be deployed anywhere and made available to any consumer over the network.

Finally, consistent with the cloud of computers with network accessible applications was the notion of “container datacenters” that are literally stackable shipping containers pre-loaded with datacenter equipment, electrical systems, and water-based cooling that can be deployed for approximately half the cost of a traditional datacenter. Additionally, if they are treated as stateless clouds, the datacenter can be easily expanded or relocated by providing the basic necessities of physical space, electricity, water, and network connectivity.