IBM launches "Blue Cloud" program to bring cloud computing to customers

The origin of the "Blue Cloud"

The concept of "blue cloud" derives from IBM's work in support of its software innovators through an IBM innovation portal called the Technology Adoption Project (Marvell Adoption Program). IBM developers can request assigned computing resources and software to test and experiment with IBM employees throughout the project.

"Over the past few months, we have gained valuable experience in cloud computing technology by providing a dynamic infrastructure environment for IBM innovators," said Dr Willy Chiu, vice president of IBM's high-performance on-demand Solutions team. Our innovative people need to consolidate a variety of hardware and software resources to deliver solutions to the marketplace, and our "Blue cloud" greatly saves the time that innovators need to get those resources, and that's the only point where customers show a strong interest in deploying similar solutions. ”

The first "Blue Cloud" product will begin to be available in spring 2008. Details of the product will be announced at that time.

IBM and large scale computing (massive Scale Computing)

The "Blue Cloud" represents IBM's next major step forward in the field of computing, because it is rooted in IBM's extensive experience in developing and leading large-scale computing for decades, including:

1. Parallel system complex (Parallel Sysplex): IBM system Z Mainframe is managed as a single system image, combined with data sharing and parallel computing to ensure that the system cluster can share workloads for high performance and high availability.

2. IBM's "Blue" SP cluster (Deep Blue SP Cluster): The previous generation of cluster technology, IBM's legendary navy blue system was famous for defeating chess master Kasparov 10 years ago.

3. "Blue Gene": a powerful large-scale super computer network that leverages open systems and a large number of very low-cost and energy efficient components. The next generation Blue gene/q is expected to eventually reach 10 to Pet flops, or China floating-point operations per second.

4. Grid computing (Computing): Based on a set of open standards and protocols, including major SOA standards. IBM is an early advocate and promoter of business grid computing and is actively implementing virtualization of distributed computing and data resources such as processing, network bandwidth, and storage capabilities to create a single system image that allows users and applications to seamlessly access huge IT resources.

Recently, IBM in Shanghai launched a "Blue Cloud" program to bring customers the use of cloud computing (Cloud Computing). It includes a range of cloud computing products that allow computing to run in a similar Internet environment by architecting a distributed, globally accessible resource structure that is not limited to local machines or remote server Farms.

The "Blue Cloud" is built on IBM's expertise in the field of leading large-scale computing, and will be based on open standards and open source software supported by IBM software, System technology and services. The "Blue Cloud", which is being developed by over 200 IBM researchers worldwide, will help customers quickly and easily explore the cloud infrastructure to achieve extreme scale operations.

IBM is collaborating with selected companies, government agencies, universities and internet companies on cloud computing, and will formally launch its first "blue cloud" offering to support power and x86 processor systems in 2008.

IBM, at the SOA Innovation Summit in Shanghai today, demonstrated how cloud computing technology, which runs on IBM BladeCenter, which configures power and x86 processors, dynamically provides and allocates resources with changes in one application workload. IBM also plans to provide a system Z "mainframe" cloud environment in 2008 to take full advantage of the ultra large number of virtual machines supported by System Z. IBM also plans to provide a cloud environment based on high-density rack clusters.

The "Blue Cloud" is based on the cloud infrastructure of the IBM Almaden Research Center (Almaden), including Xen and POWERVM virtual Linux operating system images and Hadoop parallel workload arrangements. The blue cloud is supported by IBM Tivoli software to ensure optimal performance based on requirements by managing servers. This includes providing a seamless experience for customers through software that can allocate resources in real time across multiple servers, accelerating performance and ensuring stability in the most demanding environments.

"The blue cloud will help our customers quickly build a cloud environment to test and prototype a variety of Web 2.0 applications in their own enterprise environment," said Rod Adkins, senior vice president of development and manufacturing at IBM Systems and Technology Division. In the future, this approach will help IT managers significantly reduce the complexity and cost of managing the infrastructure that is constantly fluctuating in demand. ”

Cloud computing is a new way of sharing infrastructure that can connect huge system pools together to provide a wide range of IT services. Many factors drive the need for such environments, including connectivity devices, real-time data streams, adoption of SOA, and rapid growth in Web 2.0 applications such as search, open collaboration, social networking, and mobile commerce. In addition, the improvement of the performance of digital components has greatly increased the size of the IT environment, thus further strengthening the need for a unified cloud management.

The purpose of IBM's development of the blue cloud is to help customers take full advantage of cloud computing, including cloud applications, and integrate with their existing IT infrastructures through soa-based Web services. The blue Cloud will pay special attention to breakthrough requirements for IT management simplification to ensure security, privacy, reliability, high usage, and efficiency. In addition, cloud computing is focused on existing and upcoming large-scale data-intensive workloads.

November 13, IBM and Vietnam Ministry of Technology (Vietnamese Ministry of Science and Marvell, abbreviation: MoST) jointly announced an open innovation pilot program that will run on cloud computing infrastructure.

Tran Quoc Thang, Vice Minister of Science and Technology of Vietnam, said: "The Vietnam Innovation information portal that we created with IBM" (Vietnam information for sciences and Marvell Advance Portal, referred to as VIP, will provide a dynamic and rich content resource for various organizations and the public in Vietnam to encourage innovation in national, group and government organizations. The VIP will be based on IBM's Enterprise Web 2.0 Creative Dream Factory (innovation Factory) solution, which is provided to universities and research institutions through the cloud infrastructure of IBM Almaden Research Center. ”