Virtualisation by stealth revamps IBM's Australian Development Lab

Beverley Head
Friday, 07 August 2009 12:43

Business IT - Technology

”We took 70 servers and condensed them onto eight blades using technology we have developed called Cloudburst. Now we are taking all those ideas and building a distributed cloud across all our locations.”

At present Farrow said the Lab was running 50 concurrent server workloads on the virtualised environment, but expected this to increase tenfold over the next couple of months.

He said the effect of virtualising the development servers had been significant in terms of researchers having access to the almost limitless capacity which virtualisation and cloud computing allowed.

“Three months ago it took us half a day to do a build. Now it’s down to an hour. I reckon running on a cloud of servers we can get this down to 10 minutes.

“This is starting to radically change the idea of how to develop software. And we have not spent $1 on hardware,” said Farrow. “At the same time we have liberated servers...to create a massive storage grid and again not spent a cent. This has radically changed Lab life.”