IBMhas unveiled plans for "Blue
Cloud," a series of cloud computing offerings that will allow
corporatedatacentresto operate more like the
internet.
The idea is that datacentres will enable computing across a
distributed, globally accessible fabric of resources, rather than
on local machines or remote server farms, said
IBM.
Blue Cloud is built on open standards and open source software
supported by IBM software, systems technology and services.
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 in the spring of 2008, supporting systems with IBM Power
and generic x86 processors.
At an event in Shanghai this week, IBM demonstrated how cloud
computing technologies, running on IBM BladeCenters with Power and
x86 processors and Tivoli service management software, dynamically
provision and allocate resources as workloads fluctuate for an
application.
IBM also expects to offer a System z "mainframe" cloud
environment in 2008, taking advantage of a 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 include Xen and PowerVM virtualised Linux
operating system images and Hadoop parallel workload scheduling.
Blue Cloud is also supported by IBM Tivoli software that manages
servers to ensure optimal performance based on demand.