Shoulder to shoulder with cloud computing, virtualisation has been a tech buzz over the last few years, and with a good reason. As a delivery model that enables creation of virtualised networks, applications and services, it is a way for organisations to facilitate access to critical IT resources and cut the costs associated with their implementation. With a recent invention of artificial intelligence that could further automate processes of creating virtual services, virtualisation technology was yet again brought into the IT spotlight.

Namely, as a result of a joint research carried out by CA Technologies and Swinburne University, a new process called Opaque Data Processing (ODP) was invented by a PhD candidate Miao Du. As suggested in the associated press release, the project aims to improve service virtualisation technology by eliminating important implementation and maintenance challenges. Considering the wide use of such services in contemporary enterprise and IT development settings, this innovation is certainly a great achievement that could redefine the future of service virtualisation.

How ODP works

Despite the fact that service virtualisation has been used for years, there still are many challenges organisations face when trying to make all the resources communicate with one another efficiently. These are mostly associated with the inability to virtualise specific services without expert knowledge and the original documentation that sometimes may be unavailable, which are the two aspects ODP intends to solve.

As explained by the project author in a recent interview, her technique is based on an algorithm that is used in genome sequencing to recognise a genome structure even when no specific information related to it is given. ODP uses a similar algorithm to identify service requests that resemble the ones that are previously recorded and thus minimise the need to use original documentation or consult an expert when creating virtualised services.

Furthermore, even in settings where virtualised systems are already established, ODP eliminates certain risks associated with possible updates of a single service. This is especially important in large enterprises where there are dozens or even hundreds of applications communicating with each other and relying on precisely defined settings.  Therefore, even in cases when companies need to modify existing settings, ODP may prevent system failure. When it comes to the application of her finding, she notes:

“This could also have some applicability to improve service models in response to changes in the operations data. It should make it easier to adapt your service models over time. Since we don’t need the experts to create the model, we have less need for expert knowledge to maintain the models. You could potentially have a much more continuous and adaptive virtual service models.”

The importance of the invention

Miao Du’s innovative project is certainly beneficial for the future of virtualisation technology, but its importance also lies in the fact it globally promotes the Australian research community. Namely, with the support by CA technologies in commercialising the project, Swinburne University and Miao Du in particular show how important their skills are for the highly competitive industry of information technologies. As pointed out by Professor John Gurdy, Dean of the School of Software and Electrical Engineering at Swinburne:

“It is very rewarding to see the commercialisation of our work and to know that organisations worldwide will benefit from our discovery and be able to get applications to market faster with improved software development and testing environments.”

Earlier research: virtualising supercomputer at US universities

The examples of successful collaboration of major companies and university researchers in the field of virtualisation are many and one of the earliest big discoveries in the field came from the US as a result of collaboration between Northwestern University, Sandia National Labs and The University of New Mexico.

Back in 2010, these three institutions worked together on one of the biggest virtualisation projects at the time, which yielded in the largest study on virtualisation of parallel supercomputing systems. The project was led by Peter A. Dinda, associate professor at Northwestern University and his graduate student Jack Lange, who managed to virtualise Sandia’s world-class supercomputer using a virtual machine monitor called Palacios.

The project was beneficial as it enabled more researchers to access necessary computing resources without having to upgrade their own software and hardware environment. Back in 2010, virtualisation technology was in its infancy and only a limited number of global institutions had an access to it, whereas today there are more opportunities thanks to the development of cloud computing. Certainly, in research communities it is highly important to make computing resources available any time, which is in Australia enabled by Nectar Research Cloud that powers multiple Australian institutions.

Conclusions

Although developed years apart, the two projects discussed above certainly had a wide impact on both development of virtualisation technology and promotion of academic research. From the early exploration carried out by the team at Northwestern University to Swinburne and CA project, multiple innovations were introduced in the field of service virtualisation.

Today, it represents a dominant trend in various settings and its power to enable smooth communication between services and people who use them is only to become more widely adopted. As more and more organisations shift from traditional service delivery models to innovative settings powered by cloud computing and virtualisation technologies, any attempt of removing implementation barriers is valuable.