Blue Cloud, Purple Haze

It's probably fitting that IBM announced its "Blue Cloud" initiative in Shanghai because, from what I hear, there's a blue cloud, or maybe a purple one, over the city much of time. Now I know why IBM started off with "blue"--the "Big Blue" legacy--and ended with "cloud"--as in, "cloud computing," but it's not what I'd call an auspicious tribute to a technology that's essentially a bunch of computers and networked software forming a cloud-like infrastructure for on-demand environments.

That's not to say that cloud computing isn't interesting. It really is, and IBM isn't the only outfit with its head in the clouds. Amazon has its Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in a cloud, and hooking up with it is Red Hat with its Red Hat Enterprise Linux, a web-scale virtual computing environment that provides tools, hosting, and management for compute capacity, bandwidth, and storage. And Dell is pitching Dell Cloud as a solution for corporate data-centers.

Moreover, IBM and Google have teamed up to support several U.S. universities in a cloud-computing research initiative. The IBM-Google initiative will dedicate hardware (initially several hundred PCs, but eventually several thousand), software, and services to teach students advanced parallel programming.

Blue Cloud will be available early next year and support systems with Power and x86 processors. At the Shanghai event, IBM demo'd cloud computing that dynamically provisioned and allocated resources as application workloads fluctuated.

As luck will have it, I'll be flying to China as you read this. I don't know if I'll be over Shanghai, but if so, I'll let you know first hand whether the clouds are blue or purple.

-- Jonathan Erickson
jerickson@ddj.com

Posted by Jon Erickson at 06:42 PM  Permalink