IBM has unveiled plans for "Blue Cloud," a series of cloud computing offerings that will allow corporate data centers to operate more like the Internet by enabling computing across a distributed, globally accessible fabric of resources, rather than on local machines or remote server farms.
Blue Cloud, built on IBM’s expertise in leading massive-scale computing initiatives, will be based on open standards and open source software supported by IBM software, systems technology and services. IBM announced 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.
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 recently 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 Power and x86 processors. At an event in Shanghai recently, 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 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—based on IBM’s Almaden Research Center cloud infrastructure—will include Xen and PowerVM virtualized Linux operating system images and Hadoop parallel workload scheduling. Blue Cloud is supported by IBM Tivoli software that manages servers to ensure optimal performance based on demand. This includes software that is capable of instantly provisioning resources across multiple servers to provide users with a seamless experience that speeds performance and ensures reliability even under the most demanding situations. Tivoli monitoring checks the health of the provisioned servers and makes sure they meet service level agreements.
"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 and Technology Group. "Over time, this approach could help IT managers dramatically reduce the complexities and costs of managing scale-out infrastructures whose demands fluctuate."
Cloud computing is an emerging approach to shared infrastructure in which large pools of systems are linked together to provide IT services. The need for such environments is fueled 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. 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.
IBM is developing Blue Cloud to help clients take advantage of cloud computing, including the ability of cloud applications to integrate with their existing IT infrastructure via SOA-based Web services. Blue Cloud will particularly focus on the breakthroughs required in IT management simplification to ensure security, privacy, reliability, as well as high utilization and efficiency. Cloud computing is targeted for existing workloads and emerging massively scalable, data intensive workloads.
IBM and the Vietnamese Ministry of Science and Technology (MoST) recently announced an open innovation pilot program that would run on a cloud computing infrastructure.
"The Vietnam Information for Science and Technology Advance Innovation Portal (VIP), created with IBM, will help provide Vietnamese communities and residents a dynamic, rich content source and foster innovation among the citizens, communities and government organizations," said Dr. Tran Quoc Thang, vice minister of MoST. "VIP will be based on IBM's enterprise Web 2.0 Innovation Factory solution and made available to universities and research institutions through the cloud infrastructure at IBM's Almaden Research Center."
The Origins of Blue Cloud
"By providing a dynamic infrastructure environment to IBM innovators over the past several months, we gained valuable experience with cloud computing technologies," said Dr. Willy Chiu, vice president of the IBM High Performance on Demand Solutions team. "Our customers have expressed strong interest in deploying a similar solution when we speak with them about how much time we can save innovators in obtaining the hardware and software resources they need to bring their solutions to market."
IBM and Massive Scale Computing
Blue Cloud represents the next major advance in computing that IBM is uniquely qualified to lead because it builds off of IBM’s decades of experience developing and leading massive-scale computing.
These include:
More than ever, there is a demand for IT to deliver innovation. Your IBM i has been an essential part of your business operations for years. However, your organization may struggle to maintain the current system and implement new projects. The thousands of customers we've worked with and surveyed state that expectations regarding the digital footprint and vision of the company are not aligned with the current IT environment.
TRY the one package that solves all your document design and printing challenges on all your platforms. Produce bar code labels, electronic forms, ad hoc reports, and RFID tags – without programming! MarkMagic is the only document design and print solution that combines report writing, WYSIWYG label and forms design, and conditional printing in one integrated product. Make sure your data survives when catastrophe hits. Request your trial now! Request Now.
Forms of ransomware has been around for over 30 years, and with more and more organizations suffering attacks each year, it continues to endure. What has made ransomware such a durable threat and what is the best way to combat it? In order to prevent ransomware, organizations must first understand how it works.
Disaster protection is vital to every business. Yet, it often consists of patched together procedures that are prone to error. From automatic backups to data encryption to media management, Robot automates the routine (yet often complex) tasks of iSeries backup and recovery, saving you time and money and making the process safer and more reliable. Automate your backups with the Robot Backup and Recovery Solution. Key features include:
Business users want new applications now. Market and regulatory pressures require faster application updates and delivery into production. Your IBM i developers may be approaching retirement, and you see no sure way to fill their positions with experienced developers. In addition, you may be caught between maintaining your existing applications and the uncertainty of moving to something new.
IT managers hoping to find new IBM i talent are discovering that the pool of experienced RPG programmers and operators or administrators with intimate knowledge of the operating system and the applications that run on it is small. This begs the question: How will you manage the platform that supports such a big part of your business? This guide offers strategies and software suggestions to help you plan IT staffing and resources and smooth the transition after your AS/400 talent retires. Read on to learn:
LATEST COMMENTS
MC Press Online