IBM and German business software and services firm SAP have demo’ed new technology that allows live migration of SAP applications across remote IBM POWER6 systems through cloud computing.
What this means is that cloud computing is becoming more of a realistic option for organisations where ‘large pools of systems’ are linked together to provide IT services, but where there is also a desire for a shared infrastructure.
IBM and SAP showed how enterprise applications can run in the cloud, allowing the movement of workloads across physical servers and data centres.
In a nutshell, there could be different virtual machines – logical partitions – running separate applications on the same physical server and the IBM POWER6 system’s Live Partition Mobility would allow this application to move across from one partition to a completely different one without any downtime at all.
This means that energy savings and system utilisation can be observed without affecting applications running in the cloud.
“The breakthrough we’re showing today is that applications can flexibly move across remote physical servers, regardless of location, which makes our work a strong, enabling technology for the cloud,” explained Dr. Joachim Schaper, vice-president EMEA of SAP Research.
“Specifically, in cloud-scale environments, service providers will need to provide users with access to services across the cloud. Service providers will need to compete on performance and quality of service — and so the future cloud will need to support application mobility across disparate data centers to enhance performance.”
The senior manager for system technologies at IBM’s research lab in Haifa, Israel, Dr Yaron Wolfsthal, said the technology will “realise the vision of true cloud computing”, essentially by reconfiguring and rebalancing workloads across different but interconnected networks.
By Marie Boran
