News

posted on 14 February 2008 10:51

IBM has unveiled its Blue Cloud computing initiative to allow corporate datacentres to operate more like the Internet by enabling computing across a distributed, globally accessible fabric of resources, rather than on local machines or remote server farms.  .

Cloud computing refers to the provision of computing services over the Internet from vast, highly scalable server and inter-linked storage computing farms. Google and Amazon's IT infrastructures are at the leading edge of such offerings and Sun has characterised the computing environment needed as a red shift-style of computing in comparison to the everyday IT world.

Such an infrastructure involves vast grids or clusters of computers and storage resources in inter-linked and inter-operating datacentres.

Blue Cloud will be based on open standards and open source software supported by IBM software, systems technology and services.  The evelopment is supported by more than 200 IBM Internet-scale researchers worldwide and targets clients who want to explore the extreme scale of cloud computing infrastructures quickly and easily.

IBM is currently collaborating on cloud computing initiatives with select corporations, universities, Internet-based enterprises and government agencies, including the Vietnamese Ministry of Science and Technology, which this week announced a cloud computing project with IBM.

IBM's first Blue Cloud offerings are expected to be available to customers very soon, in the spring of 2008, supporting systems with Power and x86 processors. The company expects to offer a System z “mainframe” cloud environment in 2008, taking advantage of very large number of virtual machines supported by System z. IBM also plans to offer a cloud environment based on highly dense rack clusters.

THe company says that  Blue Cloud – based on its Almaden Research Center cloud infrastructure -- will include Xen and PowerVM virtualized Linux operating system images and Hadoop parallel workload scheduling.   Blue Cloud is supported by IBM Tivoli software that manages servers to ensure optimal performance based on demand. This includes software that is capable of instantly provisioning resources across multiple servers to provide users with a seamless experience that speeds performance and ensures reliability even under the most demanding situations. Tivoli monitoring checks the health of the provisioned servers and makes sure they meet service level agreements.

So far this is predominantly about servers. What about the storage? IBM makes no specific mention of storage at all in its announcement. That has been left clouded with uncertainty.

Read about EMC's cloud computing activities here:- /index.cfm/article/3881.