The importance of interoperability – a lesson from Japan

A big challenge for the SIENA project and all stakeholders in the cloud community is the question of interoperability in what is proving to be a very heterogeneous environment.

The Fukushima nuclear power plant

Over the past weekend the world has been watching the terrible events that have hit Japan. Today news reports show widespread devastation across the north-east of the country. Despite this a few Japanese delegates have managed to make it to Brussels today for Cloudscape and we heard from one of them in the last session of the day.

Hiroshi Sakai from NTT described how as a result of the earthquake in Japan, the Fukushima nuclear power plant has been damaged leading to a serious power shortage and rolling blackouts in the Tokyo area. NTT are now unable to keep their private cloud, based in Tokyo, open continuously; it needs to be shut down every day. While NTT also has servers in the unaffected Kyoto area they can’t move their workloads from one location to another as they use different operating systems etc.

Unfortunately the events in Japan have showed that interoperability is more important than ever especially in disaster situations and it’s something everyone here is trying hard to work towards.