IBM India Systems Development Lab playing critical role in driving hybrid cloud and AI strategy

The IBM India Systems Development Lab, a global lab in the worldwide Systems business unit is at the forefront of development & innovation spanning across hardware, such as processor design, verification, memory characterization, electronic design automation, firmware, operating system, software development, performance analysis, quality assurance, etc. It is also supporting IBM's Global Systems Integrator’s mission.

Many of the pioneering work from the lab is integrated into IBM products and solutions. For instance, a lot of the innovation and technology work for the IBM Power10 processor, which plays a critical role in our hybrid cloud strategy, was designed in India by the Systems Lab team. The lab has presence in three major cities (Bangalore, Hyderabad and Pune) in India.

Here, Akhtar Ali, VP, IBM India Systems Development Lab & Technical Computing Development, tells us how the lab is playing a critical role in driving IBM's Hybrid Cloud and AI strategy.

DQ: What are the current challenges faced by the industry at an infrastructure innovation level?

Akhtar Ali: Today, CIOs are looking at making a strategic transformation from an inflexible and complex infrastructure to a hybrid-computing approach.

Hybrid IT is evolving faster -- simply put, hybrid IT (or hybrid Cloud) is an environment that combines traditional IT with cloud services from multiple cloud providers. There are many challenges that organizations are facing in adopting hybrid IT – operational complexity, managing security and compliance, data integration and skills. Local regulations, and mergers and acquisitions add to challenges as mentioned above.

CIOs can overcome the above challenges if the infrastructure is secure, resilient, scalable, and open by design, providing a flexible platform for hyper-automation, AI & Cloud adoption, which ultimately helps in a seamless digital transformation.

DQ: What is the role that IBM is playing globally in evolving the infrastructure innovation landscape?

Akhtar Ali: Enterprises are rapidly turning to technology to manage their business requirement. The changing industry and technology landscape has pushed every company to explore new ways to become more agile, flexible and respond faster to business requirements.

With the Covid-19 impact, enterprises have augmented their infrastructure to ensure there is no or minimal downtime for their critical workloads. We are constantly innovating in Cloud and on-premises infrastructure space to enable clients to accelerate their digital transformation with AI, modernizing applications and applying security everywhere.

At IBM, we continue to innovate and deliver innovations that improve life, business and reduce environmental impact.

• Power10 processor introduced several capabilities like in-memory encryption, in-core inferencing, industry-leading core performance, advanced error recovery and AI optimizations.
• We also announced the Telum processor, a central processor chip for the next generation of IBM Z and LinuxONE servers with a dedicated on-chip accelerator for AI inference.
• The goal is to offer AI-based insights from data without compromising security or response time for high volume transactional workloads – key for use cases such as real-time fraud detection.

Another great example is Spectrum Fusion – a hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) that offers a pre-configured infrastructure based on OpenShift and spectrum scale to develop faster cloud-native applications. The growing need for data protection, disaster recovery and reduction in the CAPEX and OPEX model are a few driving factors for hyper-converged infrastructure.

DQ: Elaborate on the cutting-edge work being done out of the labs in India.

Akhtar Ali: IBM Systems Development Lab in India focuses on research and development of many products ranging from processor design, operating system development, systems management, cloud software, “as a service” offerings. The focus is on complete system optimization, where the entire platform is designed with performance, scalability, security, manageability and integration.

The India Lab team plays a key role in processor design, tool development, and firmware which are the essential building blocks in the server build-up. Many team members work actively in open-source communities like Kubernetes or other AI projects that form the foundation of a hybrid cloud.

The team has been a significant contributor to intellectual property and works very closely with customers in India and the Asia Pacific, providing deep technical expertise in designing and deploying complex designs.

The India team contributed towards the development of the POWER10 and Telum processors, which IBM launched in 2020. The team was involved with key aspects of processor development -- from physical design, processor verification, and electronic design automation (EDA) tools that are at the core of designing these complex chips, validating them, and building the world’s first enterprise-scale 7nm processor.

DQ: What is the role of infrastructure in enabling enterprises in their hybrid cloud journey?

Akhtar Ali: In an increasingly volatile, uncertain and complex environment, businesses are looking to become more agile and fast-track innovation for their consumers by modernizing their Information Technology (IT) infrastructure. The hybrid multi-cloud, comprising on-premises data centers and the public clouds, will emerge as the go-to model for businesses who want to balance both security and reliability for their mission-critical workloads with agility and scalability.

IBM is introducing many “as a service” offerings that help simplify the hybrid cloud journey for enterprise customers. For example, Power Virtual Servers allows our clients to expand the Hybrid Cloud journey with a consistent experience on both on-prem and cloud for running mission-critical workloads.

Leveraging Z and LinuxONE hardware's inherent strengths, we have introduced Hyper Protect Services – a set of services designed to deliver technical assurance and give our customers complete authority over sensitive data, associated workloads and encryption keys in the public cloud. With Hyper Protect Services, you can go beyond confidential computing for the highest level of privacy assurance.

The Hybrid Cloud Foundation software powered by Redhat OpenShift (based on the Kubernetes platform) and IBM Cloud Paks runs on this infrastructure and "As a Service" offerings. These solutions can help organizations advance digital transformation with data insights, prediction, security, automation and modernization across any cloud environment.

DQ: How can integrating AI at the infrastructure level help organizations?

Akhtar Ali: AI is quickly becoming an essential component of today’s IT infrastructure. It can be used to automate enterprises, detect, identify and respond to potentially costly or catastrophic IT anomalies during an event or even before they occur. IBM has introduced AIOps solutions with a focus to detect patterns from multiple and complex data sources using machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) — bonus points for real-time.

The application clearly articulates the signal from noise within the data and enables humans to derive something about it — bonus points for human accuracy and ease of use.

Watson AIOps 2.1 will now have the ability to ingest IBM Z logs and events and add them to the entire set of available data sources to understand what the application profile looks like when there aren't any incidents.

DQ: What is the evolving skills landscape in IT infrastructure with the emergence of newer areas in R&D?

Akhtar Ali: IBM is investing heavily in R&D in various areas of emerging IT infrastructure. To highlight some key areas:

IBM continues to push the barriers of technology and recently announced a 2nm-node chip and a revolutionary transistor topology Vertical-Transport Nanosheet Field Effect Transistor (VTFET). These innovations offer tremendous hope for continued scaling and bring about many areas of research and technical challenges.

We continue to work closely with academia, on some of these research challenges, directly through faculty partnerships or under research consortiums like SemiConductor Research Corp. To fuel R&D in newer areas, several IBMers act as mentors to students researchers from IITs, on a wide range of topics, with monthly discussions. IBMers are also affiliated as adjunct faculty at leading institutions, including IITs, to foster research and academia and give back as part of the scientific community.

Some of the key skills that are in demand include chip design, systems programming, container technologies, operating systems, next-gen storage and network architectures, hybrid cloud and AI technologies.

IBM recently broke the 100-qubit barrier with the 127-qubit Eagle processor in the Quantum computing area. The company's full-stack approach delivers the best of IBM’s quantum computing systems together with the complete suite of quantum software tools and cloud services. IBM development team also interacts with the open-source and other local communities via meetups.