IBM has announced that it is to follow up its attempts to commercialise models such as utility and grid computing with a “cloud” computing  initiative.

Put in simple terms, cloud computing is similar to its utility and grid forbears in that the term describes the process of running rich internet applications that run on a "cloud" – itself a reference to a term that once described the early internet. In the cloud computing model, applications that were traditionally installed on client PCs are shifted or extended to be accessible online. These "cloud applications" are run from large data centers that host them as web services that can be accessed by any standard web browser.

IBM, perhaps predictably, is calling this new initiative Blue Cloud and its says that development is supported by more than 200 of its researchers around the world. The corporation says that it 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 last week announced a cloud computing project with Big Blue.

IBM’s first Blue Cloud offerings are expected to be available to customers in the spring of 2008. At an event in Shanghai last week, it demonstrated how cloud computing technologies, running on IBM BladeCenters with both POWER and x86 processors and Tivoli service management software, can dynamically provision and allocate resources as workloads fluctuate for an application. 

IBM also expects to offer a System z cloud environment in 2008, taking advantage of the large number of virtual machines supported by its mainframe platform. It also plans to offer a cloud environment based on highly dense rack clusters, although no mention was made of where the System i fits in with the programme.

Blue Cloud -- based on IBM’s Almaden Research Center cloud infrastructure -- will include Xen and PowerVM virtualised Linux operating system images and Hadoop parallel workload scheduling.  

 
“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 says that the need for such environments is fuelled by dramatic growth in connected devices, real-time data streams, and the adoption of service-oriented architectures and Web 2.0 applications, such as mashups, open collaboration, social networking and mobile commerce. It says that continuing advances in the performance of digital components has resulted in a massive increase in the scale of IT environments, driving the need to manage them as a unified cloud. 

Seamus Quinn