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COMPUTING giant IBM has announced plans to develop commercial “cloud computing” services based on its expertise in building massively scalable infrastructure using open standards and open source software.
Called “Blue Cloud,” the initiative was demonstrated at an unveiling in Shanghai last week. It aims to deliver infrastructure that lets corporate users operate more like the internet using “a distributed, globally accessible fabric of resources, rather than on local machines or remote server farms.”
The Blue Cloud offering is a like commercially saleable version of the Google, or EBay-like environments – massive infrastructure built on commodity hardware, open source software and designed from the ground up to cope with widely variable fluctuations in demand.
The systems deliver compute power at low-cost per-transaction cost.
IBM said that its Blue Cloud development 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.
The company said its first Cloud systems would be offered to customers by mid 2008.
At the event in Shanghai, IBM demonstrated how cloud computing technologies, running on IBM BladeCenters with Power and x86 processors and Tivoli service management software can dynamically provision and allocate resources as application workloads fluctuate.
The company will also 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.
“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 for IBM Systems & Technology Group senior vice-president for development and manufacturing, Rod Adkins.
“Over time, this approach could help IT managers dramatically reduce the complexities and costs of managing scale-out infrastructures whose demands fluctuate.”
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