Blue Cloud: IBM's Strategic Investment plan

IBM focuses its future policy direction on cloud computing. IBM plans to build a new, highly scaled business model that introduces mainstream corporate customers to Google-style computing. Some time ago, IBM formally announced its own strategy, indicating that it is developing a realistic technology in a large data center to stimulate customers ' business interests and to make it easier to run software, search information and write programs with remote hosts all over the Internet.

This internet-based Super computing model, which is now familiar to everyone, is the pooling of information and processor resources stored on PCs, mobile phones and other devices into a single cluster.

IBM calls its own ideas "blue Cloud". Most of the basic software needed for cloud computing is open source, which means that users are free to get the code and modify it. The hardware devices used in data centers are typically thousands of industrial-standard server computers, made up of Intel or AMD-produced processors and other hardware vendors.

Many experts believe that cloud computing is the further development of information technology. IBM is trying to make itself the leader of the industry in the enterprise-class cloud computing market, according to analysts. The company's strategy is to sell more hardware, software and services tailored to cloud computing, and IBM will provide server computers for cloud computing, including hosts.

IBM executives believe that this strategy, like his support for Linux, is an Open-source operating system that offers new options to people outside of Microsoft. IBM's support for Linux began in 2000, including investment in market development and technology development, and accelerated the application of Linux among enterprise users.

"For me, it's like 2000 for Linux," says Willian M.zeilter, senior vice president of the IBM System and technology team. ”

IBM now has 200 researchers focused on cloud computing, and Mr. Zeitler said IBM would invest heavily in the next three-year phase, but he did not disclose the exact amount.

Some users, including companies and government departments, have been collaborating with IBM on a small-scale cloud computing experiment. Mr Zeitler did not identify these companies, but said: "A large number of financial services companies are interested in becoming the first participants." ”

As data volumes increase at a high rate, such as banks and security companies, they face the same headaches as internet companies like Google and Yahoo. Efficiency, energy consumption and management costs are getting worse. And all of these companies are using technologies from internet companies, such as search, mobile commerce and communications, and collaboration tools like blogs, Wikipedia and social networks.

In recent years, IBM has done a lot in the data center to run efficiently, and has concentrated on desktops and other devices to run more computing tasks in the datacenter. They are named "Automatic", "valid" grid computing.

Those concepts and research work have made a productive contribution to cloud computing. Experts say many tools have been added, and users are expanding computing across many machines and making programming simpler. Those who are likely to expand the scope of cloud computing are increasingly coming from researchers who dare to deal with internet search.

"In a sense, cloud computing is a natural development of grid computing models," he said. Frank Gens, an analyst with IDC Research, said. "The difference is that Google's programming model, and its true openness. Ordinary people can also write apps without having to be PhD at Stanford or Carnegie Mellon University. ”

IBM is encapsulating the cloud computing software named Hsdoop, running on the Linux operating system. Hadoop is based on an open source search project called Nutch and Google's MapReduce software, MapReduce used to connect a large number of computers to extend complex computing tasks for large-scale datasets (larger than 1TB).