IBM Readies Blue Clouds

November 16, 2007: IBM has unveiled plans for a new series of cloud computing offerings that it claims will enable corporate data centres to “operate more like the internet” by enabling computing across a distributed, worldwide fabric of resources, rather than on local machines or remote server farms.

Called Blue Cloud, the system will be built in collaboration with corporations, universities, Internet-based enterprises and government agencies using IBM’s massive-scale computing. It will be based on open standards, and run open source software.

The company recently demonstrated how the technology will work at a conference in Shanghai, illustrating how it can be used to dynamically provision and allocate resources as workloads fluctuate for an application.

Using Tivoli software, Big Blue says the technology is capable of instantly provisioning resources across multiple servers to provide users with a seamless experience that offers performance and reliability under the most demanding situations.

“Blue Cloud will help our customers quickly establish a cloud computing environment to test and prototype Web 2.0 applications within their enterprise environment,” said Rod Adkins, Senior Vice President, Development and Manufacturing for IBM Systems & Technology Group. “Over time, this approach could help IT managers dramatically reduce the complexities and costs of managing scale-out infrastructures whose demands fluctuate.”

IBM’s first Blue Cloud offerings are expected to be available for evaluation in Q2 2008, supporting systems with Power and x86 processors. IBM also expects to offer a System z “mainframe” cloud environment in 2008, and is planning to offer a cloud environment based on highly dense rack clusters.

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