We launched a major project today to showcase an immersive government grade cloud management experience. I led the development of this from concept to delivery and its awesome. We run our visitors through a scenario developed to highlight some of the issues and trade-offs public sector and large private sector customers will face as they move their IT management to a public/private/hybrid cloud world.
UK Chancellor of the Exchequer – George Osborne
The team used a combination of a proprietary Infrastructure-as-a-service platform, a data layer built using Python to expose a restful interface and an interactive touch-enabled management interface built using Unity3D.
Demo
Here is a short video with no audio showing the system we’ve built to manage a government grade cloud computing platform. It gives an idea of some of the management scenarios the demo walks you through. At the bottom of this page I’ve added a much longer and complete walk through with Keith describing the scenarios in full.
Press Release
BRISTOL, England, Nov. 17, 2010 – HP today formally opened the HP G-Cloud Theatre, welcoming visitors to its vision of high-security, highly flexible cloud computing based on intellectual property developed at HP Labs, the company’s central research arm.
The demonstration facility, located at the HP Labs site in Bristol, targets government and public sector bodies seeking a cost-effective way to transform IT operations without compromising the security of their information assets.
While cloud computing has the potential to greatly reduce capital expenditures and administration costs, there have been serious concerns regarding the security of cloud-based infrastructures and whether the model would be applicable to storing sensitive data.
The HP G-Cloud Theatre demonstrates ways in which cloud-based systems can withstand even the most serious threats and attacks. Based on technologies currently under development by HP, the G-Cloud Theatre deploys dedicated virtual machines to monitor other virtual machines in service.
Suspicious behavior such as unusually high central processing unit (CPU) utilization or changes in input/output activity trigger automatic responses. According to predocumented rules, services can be taken down, restarted, cloned or restricted. These service virtual machines also are isolated from others so any threat can be contained.
More here in the official HP Labs press release.
Full Walk Through