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IBM, SAP demonstrate application mobility for cloud computing

IT Industry - Market

IBM and SAP have demonstrated the live migration of applications between servers in a cloud.

The basic idea of cloud computing is that the application you're running is out there somewhere. You don't worry about where, and you don't even know whether it's the same server every time.

But for the people providing the service, it's important to be able to shift workloads around so that the systems can be run efficiently.

The European Union recognises this, and is funding the RESERVOIR (Resources and Services Virtualization without Barriers) project to the tune of €17 million to develop the system and service technologies needed.

"With RESERVOIR, our aim is to provide cloud technologies that will enable energy-efficient, borderless delivery of IT services that are driven by actual demands - with the goal of keeping costs competitive," said Dr. Yaron Wolfsthal, senior manager for system technologies at IBM's Research Lab in Haifa, Israel.

As part of RESERVOIR, IBM and SAP have this week demonstrated how live applications can be moved between physical servers - even when they are located in different data centres.

"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 Joachim Schaper, VP EMEA of SAP Research.

Wolfsthal explained that the new technology responds to changes in workload by autonomically balancing resource utilisation and power consumption across remote servers.

"This is done, for example, by evacuating and turning off under-utilised servers (and possibly entire data centers) when demand drops, and powering on idle servers when load increases," he said.

The demonstration used the IBM POWER6 system's Live Partition Mobility capability to move a partition from one server to another with no application downtime.

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