The General Session was kicked off by severak clients:
- Richard Holmes, Westpac Group, a 200-year-old bank with 21,000 branch locations across Australia and New Zealand. They have migrated 70 percent of their applications to the Hybrid Cloud. Provisioning server and storage resources went from 84 days to just minutes.
- Matthias Rebellius, Siemens AG, Building Services. They use IBM Watson IoT to monitor the energy usage of their buildings. They have reduced energy consumption 20 to 30 percent, eliminating over 10 million cubic feet of CO2 greenhouse gas.
Robert LeBlanc, IBM Senior Vice President for Cloud, took the stage and welcomed the 23,000 attendees. Developers are turning to IBM Cloud to deliver timely, knowledgeable, and secure experiences for their customers and end-users. Business leaders are seeking new ways to enable their companies to securely implement hybrid cloud strategies that integrate mobile, IoT, and cognitive. He focused on five areas:
- Choice, but with Consistency
- Hybrid Cloud Integration
- DevOps productivity
- Powerful, Accessible data and analytics
- Cognitive solutions
Robert indicates that 100 percent of our strategic software products are now Hybrid-Cloud enabled. We get over 3.2 billion API calls per month, and 20,000 new IBM Bluemix users per month. More than 7,000 startups are now running on IBM SoftLayer. IBM was once again ranked #1 for Hybrid Cloud by industry analysts.
IBM predicts that 80 percent of Internet traffic will be video by year 2019. To that end, IBM offers Aspera, Ustream, and Cloudleap.
New IBM Watson APIs can analyze "tone", "emotion" and "vision".
IBM has partnered with Github to offer an Enterprise-class Github-as-a-Service offering suitable for business use.
IBM "Open for Data" has over 150 pre-populated public data sources for use with analytics. This allows applications to analyze their own data in context with public sources.
Carl Eschenbach, VMware, emphasized its partnership with IBM, announcing the ability to run VMware on IBM SoftLayer "bare metal" systems, enabling features like NSX networking and VSAN virtual storage.
Brian Cross, Apple Vice President of Product Marketing, presented the enormity of Apple's developer ecosystem:
- 1.5 million apps on Apple iOS application store
- 11 million developers making these apps
- 100 billion downloads of these apps
- 1 billion Apple devices
In the past, these developers used Xcode development environment. To take the most advantage of Apple hardware features, many developers use C or C++ programming languages to develop "Native Apps".
Apple developed a new programming language called Swift that has already made it to the top 20 development languages. He gave a demo of "Swift Playground" that allows developers see their apps running while they develop and edit the code.
Apple has made Swift open source, and extended its use across iOS, Mac OS X, Watch OS, tvOS and even Linux operating systems. This means you can write code for devices, client workstations and even servers in your datacenter or Cloud. Download it at [Swift.org].
John Ponzo, IBM Fellow, Vice President and CTO of MobileFirst, wrapped up the General session. He mentioned the "IBM Swift Sandbox" service that helps developers learn Swift programming:
- Kitura -- This open source framework would allow developers to build end-to-end applications, deploy, and collaborate on web services and applications written in Swift. Kitura allows developers to build front-end and back-end code using Swift as the programming language to help simplify modern application development.
- OpenWhisk -- A feature on IBM Bluemix that provides an event-driven computing service for dynamic applications. It competes against Amazon's Lambda service.
- [Swift Package Catalog]
With new ways to deploy Hybrid Cloud, using new composable development tools, it is clear that "Cloud" is not merely a destination, but a new innovation platform.
This session was 30 minutes with Piers Nash, University of Chicago - Center for Data Intensive Science (CDIS), client testimonial, followed by Russell Kennedy, IBM, that covered an overview of Cleversafe used in the solution.
University of Chicago's Center for Data Intensive Science (CDIS) accelerates medical discoveries by democratizing access to data for scientific research. Utilizing an object storage solution, CDIS centrally stores and manages vast amounts of genomic and clinical data at web-scale, allowing researchers to collaborate via shared access to harmonized data sets, speeding discovery and enabling precision medicine.
Their initial focus is cancer research. Cancer costs over $100 Billion USD per year in healthcare costs. It is #1 killer among people under 85 years old, affecting half of all men, and a third of all women. There are 1.7 million new cancer cases in the USA every year, 15 million worldwide.
There is no "single cure" for cancer. Whereas all humans share nearly identical 3.2 billion base pairs of genetic material, there are over 15,000 different kinds of cancers, each with its own genome. Capturing RNA sequences of patients results in images 10-20 GB in size, and over the course of treatment could add up to 1 TB of image data per patient. A million patients with 1TB of data each would be an Exabyte of data (1,000 Petabytes).
To store all of this data, CDIS created the Bionimbus Protected Data Cloud, using Cleversafe as the underlying storage technology. This system goes live June 2016, and they plan to keep the data forever.
(We'll see how well that goes 10 years from now! It might be cheaper just to re-sequence a human's DNA as needed, rather than storing it forever, since an individual's DNA never changes.)
The data is "de-identified" meaning that researches using the data are unable to identify individual people associated with each case study or genomic result. They have already collected 1.66 PB of this data.
Most cancer treatments that have been effective have focused on specific genetics. The problem is targeting precise therapies to the right patients. For example, there are two very similar Lung cancers, and about 20 percent of the time, a Lung cancer is mis-identified, such that the patients has adverse reactions to the wrong treatment. By having more analytics-based medicine, the hope is to reduce this trial-and-error approach.
Russ Kennedy, IBM, wrapped up the session explaining Cleversafe, which was a Chicago-based company formed in 2004 that was acquired last year by IBM. Why did University of Chicago choose Cleversafe? Several reasons:
- University of Chicago attempts to use open source projects like Gluster or Ceph failed around the 1-2 PB mark. They knew they would need much more than this!
- Cleversafe was a Chicago-based company, offering local support
- IDC ranked Cleversafe #1 marketshare leader of object storage in 2014 and 2015! It beats out competitors like Dell/EMC and Salty, as well as Cloud Service Providers like Amazon or Google.
Why object storage? IBM predicts a 332 percent growth in data generated from Mobile devices. As much as 90 percent of traffic on Mobile devices will be from Cloud apps rather than voice or text messages. There will be a 10-fold increase of data stored by year 2020, and at least 80 percent of this data will be unstructured content. Cleversafe estimates that managing object storage requires 15x fewer administrators than traditional storage.
Cleversafe consists of three components. The "Accessor" is software that runs bare metal, as Virtual Machine or Docker container. It offers the OpenStack Swift, HTTP/REST and Amazon S3 object-based interfaces to ingest the data. The data is encrypted, divided into pieces, then through a process called [Erasure Coding] is converted to slices. Those slices are stored on storage-rich servers called "storage nodes".
For example, five pieces of data converted to nine slices could be stored on nine machines, three machines at Site 1, three at Site 2, and three at Site 3. You only need to read back any five slices to reconstruct the data, so you could lose any four of the nine machines and still have full recoverability. If the 5/9 example above, you could lose any one site, and a machine in one of the two remaining surviving sites, and still retrieve all of your data.
There is now an "open beta" called the Transparent Cloud Storage Tiering that bridges GPFS and Spectrum Scale over to Cleversafe.