IBM Launches Cloud Initiative

ATLANTA, Ga. and ARMONK, N.Y. and COLUMBUS, Ohio -- At a ribbon-cutting ceremony in Atlanta today, IBM (NYSE:IBM - News) announced that it will collaborate with two of America's leading academic institutions on an initiative to develop new autonomic technology for cloud computing. The effort is aimed at developing future technologies and training IT professionals required to enhance the performance and energy usage of computing applications while increasing productivity in the workplace.

Together with The Georgia Institute of Technology and The Ohio State University, IBM is initiating this broad-scale, collaborative research project focused on self-managing features for virtualized data centers in a cloud computing environment. This new project includes the creation of a prototype computing cloud that links data centers from the two institutions, called the Critical Enterprise Cloud Computing Services (CECCS) facility.

Virtualized data centers give organizations the ability to do more with fewer resources by optimizing the use of software, computing hardware and storage, and network infrastructure by sharing not only across departments but also across different physical locations. Cloud computing allows corporate data centers to operate more like the Internet by enabling computing across a distributed, globally accessible fabric of resources, rather than simply depending upon local machines or remote server farms.

The success of cloud computing and a virtualized data center depends on the ability to continue the development of new management technology based upon autonomic, or self-managing, capabilities that can reduce the complexity and resources to manage the underlying distributed computing resources.

"Business environments and supporting technologies have evolved immeasurably since IBM first introduced the Autonomic Computing challenge to the industry in 2001," said Alan Ganek, IBM vice president of Autonomic Computing and CTO of IBM Tivoli Software. "Collaboration with our academic partners will pioneer new areas of research to further integrate autonomic capabilities in computer systems to help reduce the growing complexity of managing data centers in support of businesses' goals."IBM Corp.