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Ivan Harrow

Care Plans in the Cloud

Posted by Ivan Harrow Oct 12, 2009

Last week Adam Bosworth, one of the founders of Google Health and previously involved in many other successful ventures, launched his new company – keas. This is quite an interesting development as the goal of keas is to help you understand what your health data means and how you can use it to be as healthy as possible.

Keas works by getting you to complete a basic health questionnaire and to answer some questions about your family history and your wellness goals. It then assigns certain care plans to you, which, in theory, enable you to either manage your condition better or assist you in achieving your wellness goals. These care plans are designed by experts but do not constitute medical advice, diagnosis or treatment.

What makes this proposition interesting is that you can upload your medical data to the system from other services, such as Google Health, or enter details of clinical tests that you may have undergone. Keas will then attempt to provide an interpretation for you and assist you in dealing with possible next steps. This is one of the first sites to pull all of these different elements together to offer you comprehensive advice and guidance.

It sounds simple but in fact this can be a challenging area from a regulatory and a privacy perspective. Many clinicians are reluctant for data to be stored outside their country (and sometimes even outside their offices!) despite the fact that many countries have implemented stringent data privacy regulations. Additionally, providing care plans that are useful, while not crossing the line of delivering medical advice could be quite a challenge.

Keas is backed by a strong management and advisory team, and it will be interesting to see how it delivers over the coming months.

0 Comments Permalink Tags: health, healthcare, wellness, cloud_computing, privacy, intel, telehealth, care, ivan_harrow, security, personal_health, cloud
Alan Priestley

VM 09 @ Earls Court this week brings together many of the key elements driving Cloud Computing with the software and hardwrae vendors discussing their offerings to enable IT to deploy and utilise Cloud based infrastructure.

One of the major tenets of Cloud architectures is the ability to seamlessly deploy workload anywhere within the cloud and to scale available compute resources based on workload demand. Virtualisation is the key element that enables cloud providers to deliver these capabilities to their customers and it is the availability of server hardware with in-built virtualisation support that is the underpinning of these developments.

One of the key considerations when developing virtualisation software ( the hypervisor ) is how to ensure that the guest ( i.e. virtualised ) workloads do not see that they have been virtualised, to do this it is essential that the impact of the hypervisor is minimised.

For some years now Intel has been working with the hypervisor vendors to implement hardware support for virtualisation within their processors. This support is aimed at making it easier for the hypervisor vendors to implement their code and to ensure that they are able to transparently virtualize the guest or hosted workloads.

Intel’s virtualisation technology has focused on 3 key areas – the processor, the I/O subsystem and the network interfaces.

·         Processor enhancements – new instructions and protection model that enables the hypervisor to co-exist with unmodified guest operating systems and to host multiple operating systems on the same hardware. With successive generations of Intel processors new features have been added to the processor to help the hypervisor operate and to reduce its overhead.

·         I/O subsystem – one of the limiters in early virtualisation implementations was the ability to ensure adequate I/O throughput and isolation between various workloads sharing the same physical I/O devices.  Many new Intel Xeon processor based servers now have virtualisation support built into the chipsets.

·         Network interfaces – another challenge with running multiple guest environments on the same server has been the need for them to share the same physical network interfaces and for the hypervisor to manage the separation and distribution of network traffic between the various guest virtual machines. This has been addressed with the latest network interface chips that provide hardware support to manage movement of network data directly between the LAN and virtual machines

It’s also worth noting that raw CPU performance plays a significant part in determining the number of workloads a virtualised server can host. For example if the hypervisor consumes ~10% of the available compute resource, reducing the hypervisor overhead by 10% would result in ~1% more CPU resource being available to the guest workloads, whereas increasing the CPU performance by 10% provides 10% more compute resource to the guest environments – which could equate to 1 or more addition virtual machines being hosted.

When all this is hardware support is put together with the software developments that the hypervisor vendors have been making in terms of tools to dynamically provision and move workload between various physical servers we can start to see how the underpinnings of cloud computing are being put in place.

For further reading there’s lots of good stuff in the Cloud Computing and Virtualisation tracks at the recent IDF, all the materials are here.

0 Comments Permalink Tags: cloud_computing, virtualisation, xeon, idf09, intel, servers
Alan Priestley

My First Cloud

Posted by Alan Priestley Oct 2, 2009

Much of what we read on the web today around cloud computing focus’s on the big US providers with their massive data centre capacity, most of which is centred around providing ‘services’ to consumers – IM, email, on-line photo galleries, backup etc. A lot of what’s written would also lead us to believe that many IT departments are going to ditch all their internal IT equipment, servers, storage etc and move wholeheartedly into the cloud.


I suspect in reality the situation is somewhat different.


For many IT organisations the first step in the direction of cloud computing will be to virtualise their existing infrastructure and workloads to provide ‘cloud-like ‘ services internally to their organisation.  Once this model has been established it then becomes viable to consider moving some non-business critical workloads out onto computer resources operated by third parties, i.e. external or public cloud services, whilst still retaining high degree of control over the application stack and data.

 

For smaller organisations without a comprehensive internal IT infrastructure the situation may be somewhat different as cloud services provides them with the option of accessing software functionality form the cloud without having to setup up and maintain themselves; these could vary from email systems, office productivity applications and all the way to complete ERP solutions.

 

So, are you planning your first cloud deployment and what will it be – an internal cloud or will you go the whole way and into the great unknown of the public cloud ??

 

If you want to find out more about your options for deploying cloud computing the IT Expo in London ( 7-8 Oct @ Earls Court ) is a good place to start, there’s also the opportunity to hear Intel experts talking about virtualisation and future compute models.

2 Comments Permalink Tags: cloud_computing, it_expo, vm_09
Craig Paul Wallace

And IT Galaxy will be there...

 

 

07-09 October, 10.30am  |  Earls Court, London  |  Stand 716, IBM Theatre

 

 

VM 09 returns for it's 2nd year to exhibit the most up-to-date virtualisation technologies, and with one emphasis that we are delighted about - Server Virtualisation.

 

 

According to IP Expo "The event will include keynote presentations, a seminar programme running over both days and hands-on demonstrations, which will help visitors to address the issues currently dominating this fast-growing market." (Source: http://www.ipexpo.co.uk/IP-Expo/Virtualisation/)

 

 

Our very own Business Solutions Director, Steve Shakespeare, will be hosting a seminar in association with IBM titled 'More performance, less power: The server nirvana'.

 

Where?

 

Server Virtualisation Theatre - IBM

Synopsis: Breakthroughs in processor performance are transforming the way IT organizations utilise and improve data centre productivity and energy efficiency. Intel® Xeon® processors based on Intel® Core™ microarchitecture integrate hardware for virtualization into all key server components including Intel® Virtualization Technology helping IT organizations consolidate more applications and heavier workloads on each server to improve flexibility, reliability, and total cost of ownership (TCO). As the basis of Intel's most advanced –Intelligent- server technology, Intel Core microarchitecture improves virtualization performance across every part of the server platform

 

 

 

Malcolm Hay will also be hosting a seminar, in association with DELL - titled 'Next Generation Client Computing Models'.

 

Where?

 

Data centre Management Theatre - DELL

Synopsis: Learn how the new developments in client side virtualization will enable new levels of client manageability and security without compromise to the end user mobility and performance experience.

 

 

 

 

Our virtualisation guru, Alan Priestly, has written several blogs on cloud computing. Check one out!
Alan will also be blogging LIVE from the clouds on the day of VM 09.

 

 

 

 

If you required any further information, please visit IP Expo. We look forward to seeing you there.

 

 

Your IT Galaxy Team

0 Comments Permalink Tags: intel, tco, xeon, core, performance, power, cloud_computing, virtualisation, virtual, servers, 09, management, security, mobility, vm
Alan Priestley

The Challenge is to find it !


The promise that Cloud Computing brings is that of a ubiquitous compute infrastructure that provides services accessible over the internet from anywhere, by any device, and as such Cloud Computing is currently getting lots of air-time on the web news services.

The challenge at present is much like in real life every cloud is different, offering different capabilities & services, different tools to manage, different SLA's different charging models etc - basically all clouds are unique.

Before embarking  into the great unknown of Could Computing enterprise IT managers need to fully understand what they are being offered and to look closely at their current infrastructure to determine how best to utilise Cloud Computing. Its key to understand what apps and/or workload may be suitable for moving into the cloud - for many IT departments today this starts with assessing non-mission/business critical workloads, for Intel's IT department this meant starting with our internal travel expenses tool and hosting this as a cloud service. If you haven't seen it there is a great white paper that outlines IT@Intel's cloud strategy and how they assess which applications and workload to land into the cloud.

One of the initial considerations to make when deciding to use cloud computing is whether to move directly to using an external cloud service or to utilise resources within ones own data centres to setup 'internal clouds'. For many IT departments this is a logical extension of the ongoing work to virtualize their existing infrastructure and provides a valuable learning platform before setting out into the great unknown of the external 'public' cloud infrastructure.


Some of the questions IT managers need to ask when evaluating Cloud Computing offerings are

  • What's the SLA being offered - how reliable is the service, what's the guaranteed uptime, what's the response time to fix failures ( nearly every week there are reports of cloud failures ),  what's the financial impact of loss of cloud services and how would this be recompensed.
  • What's the application latency/response time
  • How secure is the service - backup policy for data, how secure is my data, what's the isolation between my app/data and other customers in a multi-tenanted cloud.
  • Where is my app/data located - what's the impact on local data protection laws,

& the list goes on . . .

To add to the confusion around Cloud there are many different 'Service' offerings being discussed within the industry, these vary from renting raw compute resource by the hour - Virtual Machines that look like servers -  through pay-per-use for complex business applications.  Everything is a Service its just a case of what type of service you want to buy - Infrastructure as a Service ( IaaS ), Platform as a Service ( PaaS ) or Software as a Service ( SaaS ).

Today most vendors offering 'Infrastructure as a Service' have developed their own cloud platforms based around open source or commercially available hypervisors and these require specific tools and stack formatting to utilise the virtualised compute resources. Cloud vendors offering PaaS  provide application/web frameworks enabling the use of higher levels of abstraction e.g. Python, Ruby or .Net. With both IaaS and PaaS the customer needs to develop and maintain the application stack that will run in the cloud, whereas with SaaS the provider maintains the application, the customer just provides the data and pays for use of the application.

All of this further drives the uniqueness of every cloud offering. This will no doubt change over time as the major virtualisation vendors make inroads into this space and standards get developed for packaging virtual machines to be loaded into the cloud and services interfaces.

But today there is little/limited interoperability between Cloud providers and this can limit the flexibility and usability of the Cloud.

So great promises, and lots of challenges, but as the saying goes 'every cloud has a silver lining' - IT just needs to work out how to extract the benefit before the clouds all float away.

0 Comments Permalink Tags: could, cloud_computing, datacentre
Ian Lloyd

Welcome to a new series of blogs for the UK.  I have been with Intel for almost 9 years and had a broad range of jobs through IT to Technical Marketing and Sales. I have interests in IT Infrastructure as a whole and cloud computing. I love mountain biking and scuba diving and adventure travel.

Before Intel, I started in Industry in British Steel (now Corus) working one of the Hot steel strip mill in South Wales. Sometimes people have a perception of the steel industry as an archaic manufacturing industry. Not so. The manufacturing processes are highly automated requiring a minimum of operators. A lot of the work I did in the Hot Mill was written in Pascal running on MicroVAX’s used to mathematically model the steel rolling process. The process itself is hot, noisy and quite spectacular. I came across a YouTube video which gives you an idea of what it was like. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6xnKmt_gsLs

 

Following British Steel and then LG Semicon and prior to Joining Intel, I worked running my own IT contract business for a couple of years between 1999 and 2000. When I look back, it was then (not that I realised it at the time) that I started doing some work using cloud computing and in particular Platform as a Service (PaaS). This is one of the three cloud computing models – PaaS, IaaS and SaaS. The second two being Infrastructure and Software. Just to briefly talk about some work I did for small businesses, I had a specific requirement at the time to implement an internet presence with sufficient bandwidth to handle some hosting for some customers of mine. The service needed to be up and running quickly with the flexibility for me to be able to control and manage web services, DNS entries and email relaying myself. As I was a small start-up company and costs needed to be controlled, using a leased line (broadband was not available!) and hosting my own hardware was not an option. I did some research and came across a company called DSVR. Designer Servers Ltd were founded in 1998 with the aim of providing flexible, powerful, yet easy to use web hosting solutions to the web design industry including PHP, Linux and MySQL hosting. DSVR were able to deliver, on demand (and production of a credit card!) a virtualised server which was yours to manage, connected to the internet with a set amount of disk capacity. It came with a support centre in which I could do all the configuration that was needed. DSVR has since been acquired by Demon Internet and subsequently Thus PLC however the service is still available and this is the current product offering from them. http://www.demon.net/demon/products/hosting/virtualserverhosting

I still use the demon service myself, which I share between a few friends with small businesses. If you just happen live in the Slough or Burnham area and are looking for an excellent independent optician, then take a look at www.walkerandcampbell.co.uk. The web presence is hosted on a designer server to this day.

There are many resources and references through the Intel website. Here are two papers which have been written by some of my colleagues in IT @ Intel and discuss how Cloud computing poses new questions about the optimal enterprise computing strategy.

 

http://communities.intel.com/docs/DOC-2983

http://communities.intel.com/docs/DOC-2544

I would welcome any comments..... on cloud computing or indeed any other topics!

0 Comments Permalink Tags: iaas, virtualisation, healthcare, saas, paas, cloud_computing

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