Exploring the cloud's potential

The next generation of cloud computing services and platforms will look very different, and hardware giant Intel and business software firm SAP recently launched a collaborative research facility in Belfast’s Titanic Quarter business and science park to discover how best to provide them.

Computing talked to Intel’s chief technology officer (CTO) Justin Rattner and SAP’s head of research Lutz Heuser about their aims.

What does this collaboration mean for Intel and SAP?
JR: The co-lab represents a new approach to research, with companies such as Intel and SAP demonstrating a high level of mutual trust and helping to leverage one another’s investment. The joint effort will mean better results more quickly for our companies and the industry at large.

In addition, sustainability is a key concern for us. One thing we’re learning from the consumer cloud is that energy is an important consideration, and that a lot of effort is required to make these cloud systems energy efficient, because operating costs are increasingly the main costs.

It is no coincidence that datacentres such as those of Google or Microsoft have sprung up in cooler climates –­ both are situated on the Columbia river in the US, and use the water as a cooling mechanism.

What do you think are the biggest issues for companies considering rolling out cloud services?
LH: They have to trust the service. If I know that my enterprise’s data is being handled correctly, I don’t care where the data is physically located. However, the trust is not there yet, so we have to work on that.

n addition, we have to make it easy for the chief executive to allow the IT leaders to adopt a solution such as this. Ultimately, companies want to lower their total costs, and the solution should run as smoothly as if it were in-house –­ it will make life easier, not more complex.

Will Intel concentrate primarily on the hardware aspects of the proj ect, with SAP taking responsibility for the software?
JR: Intel is much more software focused than you would imagine, and increasingly what we do at the hardware level is driven by what we understand at the software level.

Much of our work with SAP will be around software and services, and the understanding we get from this will influence our hardware designs.

We have not seen the first generation of truly cloud-optimised hardware yet. We don’t know what servers designed specifically for these large cloud datacentres will look like; certainly different from traditional enterprise servers.

Look at Google ­ – it tore out the bits it didn’t need from the server motherboards before setting up its cloud centres. So it doesn’t take a genius to realise that a cloud service probably has an optimum hardware architecture that we have yet to identify. We are starting to think about this.

How will you determine whether or not this partnership has been a success and what do you expect the practical results to be?
LH: Our initial joint venture started three or four years ago and we already have some results in the pipeline that we can’t announce yet – these will be around internet infrastructures and sustainable IT.

We are figuring out where the sweet spots are, and who the early adopters are likely to be –­ these companies will take the cloud infrastructure as part of their business model and drive them further.

We believe there will be a lot of new players in this arena offering services akin to iTunes and Facebook in the enterprise market. In five years there will be successful examples of this because we will have the new infrastructure.