Transcript of a Briefings Direct podcast on how MIT researchers are reaping the benefits on virtualization.

1. MIT Media Lab Computing Director Details the Virtues of
Cloud Computing for Satisfying Disparate and Fast-
Evolving Workload Demands
Transcript of a Briefings Direct podcast on how MIT researchers are reaping the benefits on
virtualization.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Sponsor: VMware
Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to a special BriefingsDirect podcast series coming to you
directly from the VMworld 2014 Conference. I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor
Solutions, your host throughout this series of BriefingsDirect IT strategy
discussions.
We’re here in San Francisco the week of August 25 to explore the latest
developments in hybrid cloud computing, user computing, software-defined
data center (SDDC), and virtualization infrastructure management.
Our next innovator case study interview focuses on the MIT Media Lab in
Gardner:
Cambridge, Massachusetts and how they're exploring the use of cloud and hybrid cloud and
getting benefits from disaster recovery.
To learn more about how the MIT Media Lab is using cloud computing, we’re joined today by
Michail Bletsas. He is a research scientist and Director of Computing at the MIT Media Lab.
Welcome.
Michail Bletsas: Thank you.
Gardner: Tell us a little bit about the MIT Media Lab. How big is the organization? What’s your
charter?
Bletsas: The organization is one of the many independent research labs within
MIT. MIT is organized in departments, which do the academic teaching, and
research labs, which carry out the research.
The Media Lab is a unique place within MIT. We deviate from the normal
academic research lab in the sense that a lot of our funding comes from member
companies and it comes in a non-direct fashion. Companies become members of
Bletsas
the lab, and then we get the freedom to do whatever we think is best.
We try to explore the future. We try to look at what our digital life will look like 10 years out, or
more. We're not an applied research lab in the sense that we're not looking at what's going to

2. happen two or three years from now. We're not looking at short-term future products. We're
looking at major changes 15 years out.
I run the group that takes care of the computing infrastructure for the lab and, unlike a normal IT
department, we're kind of heavy on computing. We use computers as our medium. The Media
Lab is all about human expression, which is the reason for the name and computers are one of
the main means of expression right now. We're much heavier than other departments in how
many devices you're going to see. We're on a pretty complex network and we run a very dynamic
environment.
Major piece
A lot has changed in our environment in recent years. I've been there for almost 20 years. We
started with very exotic stuff. These days, you still build exotic stuff, but you're using commodity
components. VMware, for us, is a major piece of this strategy because it allows us a more
efficient utilization of our resources and allows us to control a little bit the server proliferation
that we experienced and that everybody has experienced.
We normally have about 350 people in the lab, distributed among staff, faculty members,
graduate students, and undergraduate students, as well as affiliates
from the various member companies. There is usually a one-to-five
correspondence between virtual machines (VMs), physical
computers, and devices, but there are at least 5 to 10 IPs per person
on our network. You can imagine that having a platform that allows
us to easily deploy resources in a very dynamic and quick fashion is very important to us.
We run a relatively small operation for the size of the scope of our domain. What's very
important to us is to have tools that allow us to perform advanced functions with a relatively
short learning curve. We don’t like long learning curves, because we just don’t have the
resources and we just do too many things.
You are going to see functionality in our group that is usually only present in groups that are 10
times our size. Each person has to do too many things, and we like to focus on technologies that
allow us to perform very advanced functions with little learning. I think we've been pretty
successful with that.
Gardner: So your requirements are of to support those 350 people with dynamic workloads,
many devices. What is it that you needed to do in your data center to accommodate that? How
have you created a data center that’s responsive, but also protects your property, and that allows
you to reduce your risk in terms of loss?
Bletsas: Unlike most people, we tend to have our resources concentrated close to us. We really
need to interact with our infrastructure on a much shorter cycle than the average operation. We've
been fortunate enough that we have multiple, small data centers concentrated close to where our

3. researchers are. Having something on the other side of the city, the state, or the country doesn’t
really work in an environment that’s as dynamic as we are.
We also have to support a much larger community that consists of our alumni or collaborators. If
you look at our user database right now, it’s something in the order of 3,500, as opposed to 350.
It’s a very dynamic in that it changes month to month. The important attributes of an
environment like this is that we can’t have too many restrictions. We don’t have an approved list
of equipment like you see in a normal corporate IT environment.
Our modus operandi is that if you bring it to us, we’ll make it work. If you need to use a specific
piece of equipment in your research, we’ll try to figure out how to integrate it into your workflow
and into what we have in there. We don’t tell people what to use. We just help them use whatever
they bring to us.
In that respect, we need a flexible virtualization platform that doesn’t impose too many
restrictions on what operating systems you use or what the configuration of the VMs are. That’s
why we find that solutions, like general public cloud, for us are only applicable to a small part of
our research. Pretty much every VM that we run is different than the one next to it.
Flexibility is very important to us. Having a robust platform is very, very important, because you
have too many parameters changing and very little control of what's going on. Most importantly,
we need a very solid, consistent management interface to that. For us, that’s one of the main
benefits of the vSphere VMware environment that we’re on.
Public or hybrid
Gardner: Of course, virtualization sounds like a great fit when you have such dynamic,
different, and varied workloads. But what about taking advantage of cloud, public cloud, and
hybrid cloud to some degree, perhaps for disaster recovery (DR) or for backup failover. What's
the rationale, even in your unique situation, for using a public or hybrid cloud?
Bletsas: We use hybrid cloud right now that’s three-tiered. MIT has a very large campus. It has
extensive digital infrastructure running our operations across the board. We also have facilities
that are either all the way across campus or across the river in a large co-location facility in
downtown Boston and we take advantage of that for first level DR.
A solution like the vCloud Air allows us to look at a real disaster scenario, where something
really catastrophic happens at the campus, and we use it to keep certain critical databases,
including all the access tools around them, in a farther-away location.
It’s a second level for us. We have our own VMware infrastructure and then we can migrate
loads to our central organization. They're a much larger organization that takes care of all the
administrative computing and general infrastructure at MIT at their own data centers across

4. campus. We can also go a few states away to vCloud Air [and migrate our workloads there in an
emergency].
So it’s a very seamless transition using the same tools. The important attribute here is that, if you
have an operation that small, 10 people having to deal with such a complex set of resources, you
can't do that unless you have a consistent user interface that allows you to migrate those
workloads using tools that you already know and you're familiar with.
We couldn’t do it with another solution, because the learning curve would be too hard. We know
that remote events are remote, until they happen, and sometimes they do. This gives us, with
minimum effort, the ability to deal with that eventuality without having to invest too much in
learning a whole set of tools, a whole set of new APIs to be able to migrate.
We use public cloud services also. We use spot instances if we need a high compute load and for
very specialized projects. But usually we don’t put persistent loads or critical loads on resources
over which we don’t have much control. We like to exert as much control as possible.
Gardner: I'd like to explore a little bit more this three-tiered cloud using common management,
common APIs. It sounds like you're essentially taking metadata and configuration data, the things
that will be important to spin back up an operation should there be some unfortunate occurrence,
and putting that into that public cloud, the vCloud Air public cloud. Perhaps it's DR-as-a-service,
but only a slice of DR, not the entire data. Is that correct?
Small set of databases
Bletsas: Yes. Not the entire organization. We run our operations out of a small set of databases
that tend to drive a lot of our websites. A lot of our internal systems drive our CRM operation.
They drive our events management. And there is a lot of knowledge embedded in those
databases.
It's lucky for us, because we're not such a big operation. We're relatively small, so you can
include everything, including all the methods and the programs that you need to access and
manipulate that data within a small set of VMs. You don’t normally use them out of those VMs,
but you can keep them packaged in a way that in a DR scenario, you can easily get access to
them.
Fortunately, we've been doing that for a very long time because we started having them as
complete containers. As the systems scaled out, we tended to migrate certain functions, but we
kept the basic functionality together just in case we have to recover from something like that.
In the older days, we didn’t have that multi-tiered cloud in place. All we had was backups in
remote data centers. If something happened, you had to go in there and find out some unused
hardware that was similar to what you had, restore your backup, etc.

5. Now, because most of MIT's administrative systems run under VMware virtualization, finding
that capacity is a very simple proposition in a data center across campus. With vCloud Air, we
can find that capacity in a data center across the state or somewhere else.
Gardner: For organizations that are intrigued by this tiered approach to DR, did you decide
which part of those tiers would go in which place? Did you do that manually? Is there a part of
the management infrastructure in the VMware suite that allowed you to do that? How did you
slice and dice the tiers for this proposition of vCloud Air holding a certain part of the data?
Bletsas: We are fortunate enough to have a very good, intimate knowledge of our environment.
We know where each piece lies. That’s the benefit of running a small organization. We
occasionally use vSphere’s monitoring infrastructure. Sometimes it reveals to us certain usage
patterns that we were not aware of. That’s one of the main benefits that we found there.
We realized that certain databases were used more than we thought. Just looking at those access
patterns told us, “Look, maybe you should replicate this." It doesn’t cost much to replicate this
across campus and then maybe we should look into pushing it even further out.
It is a combination of having a visibility and nice dashboards that reveal patterns of activity that
you might not be aware of even in an environment that's not as large as ours.
Gardner: We’re here at VMworld 2014. There's been quite a bit of news, particularly in the
vCloud Air arena. We've talked and heard about betas for ObjectStore and for virtual private
cloud. Are these of interest to you now that you’ve done a hybrid cloud using DR-as-a-service?
Does anything else intrigues you?
Standard building blocks
Bletsas: We like the move towards standardization of building blocks. That’s a good thing
overall, because it allows you to scale out relatively quickly with a minor investment in learning
a new system. That’s the most important trend out there for us. As I've said, we're a small
operation. We need to standardize as much as possible, while at the same time, expanding the
spectrum of services. So how do you do that? It’s not a very clear proposition.
The other thing that is of great interest to us is network virtualization. MIT is in a very peculiar
situation compared to the rest of the world, in the sense that we have no shortage of IP addresses.
Unlike most corporations where they expose a very small sliver of their systems to the outside
world and everything happens on the backend, our systems are mostly exposed out there to the
public internet.
We don’t run very extensive firewalls. We're a knowledge dissemination and distribution
organization and we don’t have many things to hide. We operate in a different way than most
corporations. That shows also with networking. Our network looks like nothing like what you

6. see in the corporate world. The ability to move whole sets of IPs around our domain, which is
rather large and we have full control over, is a very important thing for us.
It allows for much faster DR. We can do DR using the same IPs across the town right now
because our domain of control is large enough. That is very powerful because you can do very
quick and simple DR without having to reprogram IP, DNS Servers, load balancers, and things
like that. That is important.
The other trend that is also important is storage virtualization and storage tiering and you see that
with all the vendors down in the exhibit space. Again, it allows you to match the application
profile much easier to what resources you have. For a rather small group like ours, which can't
afford to have all of its disk storage and very high-end systems, having a little bit of expensive
flash storage, and then a lot of cheap storage, is the way for us to go.
The layers that have been recently added to VMware, both on the network side and the storage
side help us achieve that in a very cost-efficient way.
Gardner: But of course you understand, though, that the benefits of having a highly virtualized
environment including the data center, including the end user computing endpoints, gives you
that flexibility of taking workloads and apps from development to test to deployments. So there's
a common infrastructure approach there, but also a common infrastructure across cloud, hybrid
cloud, and DR.
So it’s sort of a snowball effect. The more virtualization you're adapting, the more dynamic and
agile you can be across many more aspects of IT.
Bletsas: For us, experimentation is the most important thing. Spinning out a large number of
VMs to do a specific experiment is very valuable and being able to commandeer resources across
campus and across data centers is a necessary requirement for something like an environment
like this. Flexibility is what we get out of that and agility and speed of operations.
In the older days, you had to go and procure hardware and switch hardware around. Now, we
rarely go into our data centers. We used to live in our data centers. We go there from time to time
but not as often as we used to do, and that’s very liberating. It’s also very liberating for people
like me because it allows me to do my work anywhere.
Gardner: Very good. I'm afraid we’ll have to leave it there. We’ve been discussing the virtues of
cloud computing and hybrid cloud computing with the MIT Media Lab. I’d like to thank our
guest, Michail Bletsas, who is the research scientist and Director of Computing there at the MIT
Media Lab in Cambridge, Mass. Thanks so much.
Bletsas: Thank you.
Gardner: And also a big thank you to our audience for joining this special podcast series coming
to you directly from the 2014 VMworld Conference in San Francisco.

7. I'm Dana Gardner; Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host throughout this series of
VMware-sponsored BriefingsDirect IT discussions. Thanks again for listening and come back
next time.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Sponsor: VMware
Transcript of a Briefings Direct podcast on how MIT researchers are reaping the benefits on
virtualization. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2014. All rights reserved.
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