IBM goes Blue Cloud with corporates

16 November, 2007

The IBM strategy seeks to exploit the technical work and commercial interest in large data centers that can be run more efficiently, searched for information and programmed from remote locations over the Internet. 2 Known as cloud computing the information can be accessed by huge distances by a laptop personal computer, cellphone or other device.

Just as IBM supported Linux as an alternative to Microsoft, IBM will now carry Blue Cloud into the corporate domain and has 200 researchers working on the echnology. Several customers, including corporations and government agencies, have been   piloting cloud computing projects. Companies with fast-growing data centers, like banks and securities firms, are facing the same headaches as the large Internet companies, like Google and Yahoo.

Efficiency needs, power  and management costs are rising. All companies are increasingly searching, using mobile commerce and communications, as well as the collaboration tools of blogs, wikis and social networking.

 IBM has already championed efforts to make data centers more efficient and to centralise  computing tasks in data centers called “autonomic,” “utility” and "grid computing"  All this has moved towards the natural step of cloud computing. Experts say tools have been added to spread computing tasks across clusters of many machines and to make programming simpler.

IBM's software package for Blue Cloud is  Hadoop, running on the Linux OS . Hadoop is based on an open-source search project called Nutch, and an open-source version of Google's MapReduce software to spread complex tasks across clusters.

Source:www.nytimes.com/2007/11/15/technology/15blue.html