Qualcomm floats toward a corporate cloud

Qualcomm is in the early phases of building out an internal-facing cloud computing infrastructure in its data center that will serve the company's various departments and business units

So what does that mean?

With more than 70% of its server infrastructure now running on virtual machines, the telecom chipmaker is taking it to the next level. It will create a common pool out of its physical and virtual servers and assemble a suite of management tools and technologies that CIO Norm Fjeldheim says will automatically provision servers on request and reallocate available resources between server-based applications as workloads change.

All of this will be fully automated, in real time, and in compliance with service level agreements - no adminstrator intervention needed. At least that's the brass ring that Fjeldheim and his IT team are reaching for as they being to deploy the pilot this year.

Today the Qualcomm cloud is a lab project that includes a few HP blade server enclosures and some Sun gear, but in two years' time it could start scaling out to thousands of machines and eventually consume the company's compute grids as well.

Paul Poppleton is a senior staff engineer who also serves as Qualcomm's virtualization architect. He acknowledges that the technology to make this vision happen isn't yet fully baked. But, he says, the technology vendors "...are about maybe 60% to 70% there to realizing our full dream. We were surprised at how far along some of the key technologies are at this point," he told me in an interview last month.

Today the experiment amounts to nothing more than a small group of test servers running a VMware virtualization suite and Datasynapse's FabricServer for application management and resource allocation. Cisco's VFrame and Citrix's Xen virtualization hypervisor may eventually be part of the mix as well, Poppleton says.

Two things are holding the project back. One is the maturity of the technologies needed to manage the cloud. The other is a tangle of software licensing issues that must be sorted out. If those problems can be resolved, Qualcomm may go into limited production with the project, perhaps as soon as 2010.