This post is inspired by my ongoing analysis of Rackspace, an up and coming provider of managed and hybrid hosting services in the cloud computing industry. The content of this post is based on my observations gathered while attending technical and general sessions at IBM Pulse 2013. Here I will keep the technology focus limited to cloud computing, specifically, IBM’s offering, SmartCloud. It may be said that the general smarter cloud strategies used by IBM’s customers all over the world might not be optimal in the true sense, given their recent move to using OpenStack as the underlying platform, but the investment in cloud does indicate how committed IBM is to the SmartCloud product offering.

Any product or services strategy should seek to maximize the value from the entire value chain of a firm. IBM does this beautifully by demonstrating during the pre-sales efforts, clear value to the customer which includes assessing architectural fit and technology advantages coming directly from the cloud offering.

IBM’s offerings are SmartCloud Provisioning, the product and SmartCloud Enterprise,  the service. They use OpenStack (i’ll blog about this in detail later) as the underlying technology platform. This post discusses IBM’s deployment of SmartCloud at China Unicom which is a state-owned telecom provider, ranked as the 3rd biggest mobile provider in the world. The client is a division of this company, called the Network Management division that owns 19 separate networks used to run the “kernel services” that provide network and application monitoring tools to the user and administration community.

The key challenge for IBM is to provide the VMs which host the kernel services in a way that provides maximum flexibility, security and scalability on 19 separate networks. Another design constraint is to separate internal traffic from external network traffic.

The architecture proposed is clearly very simple- host multiple VMs on several KVM hosts (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) to create a highly available platform for hosting the kernel services, a set of monitoring applications deemed business critical. Request mapping is automatically serviced using IP address resolution and vLAN mapping techniques enabled using smart networking techniques and the features provided by SmartCloud.

It is said by many that cloud is composed of three key architectural elements- compute, storage and network. The network is the key challenge because compute and storage are offered by the product but network is a  solution component. Especially, because network components can differ from one VM node to another. There is also the problem of network traffic isolation wherein the internal traffic must be kept separate from external traffic.

The solution proposed includes 100% isolation of the network between host and VM, unique signatures for internal traffic, user authentication against an enterprise directory, user and group access control, and SSH password less keys that remain embedded in the linux VMs. The value and benefit to customer include self service portal which is shared between network administrators and end users,  a flexible IaaS solution, adaptable and scalable multiple vLANs switching architecture and reliance on open source projects such as ZooKeeper to provide end point management. Then there is the nice add-on, P2P based socialized communication which entails running bots on each hypervisor node that communicate with bots on other nodes in order to ensure availability at all times. If one bot goes missing, the next available bot picks up its share of pending requests.

Credit for some content in this blog goes to Jeff Yang, who is the owner of the OpenIBM twitter feed at http://twitter.com/OpenIBM.

Apologies for not including architecture diagrams- I am writing this on the go.