IBM Intros Blue Cloud

ARMONK, N.Y. and SHANGHAI, China -- In Shanghai today, IBM 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 today 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 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 Power and x86 processors. At an event in Shanghai today, 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.

IBM Corp.