Big Blue’s Cloud Computing Almost Here

February 20, 2008: After unveiling its plans late last year, IBM has introduced its new ready-to-use Blue Cloud computing offerings, enabling corporate data centres to function in a similar fashion to the internet.

IBM says the technology enables computing across a distributed, globally-accessible fabric of resources, rather than on local machines or remote server farms. Blue Cloud will be based on open standards and open source software, and supported by IBM software, systems technology and services.

Blue Cloud’s development is supported by upwards of 200 IBM researchers worldwide, and is targeted at clients who want to explore the “extreme scale of cloud computing infrastructures” and dynamically provision and allocate resources as workloads fluctuate for applications.

Big blue is currently collaborating 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.

Following this, the company says the first Blue Cloud offerings are expected to be available to customers around the end of Q1 2008 and will support systems with Power and x86 processors.

IBM also 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.

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