So IBM plans to bring the cloud to the enterprise. Looks like Amazon has made everyone sit up and notice, although I do find it amusing when even venerable HPC blogs call Hadoop a “RAID”.
Big Blue has realized that computing in the cloud is here to stay, and as THE supercomputing company, they shouldn’t stay out of the fun. From what I can tell IBM has decided to start providing “cloud ready” servers for data centers along with other server virtualization and management solutions that they provide. One could say that all this means is that they are providing Linux/Java stacks with Hadoop on them. It was interesting to note that the Sr. VP for Systems & Technology at IBM likened the cloud to “Linux in 2000″.
I still feel that IBM is better served adding the “cloud” to its on-demand capacity. They already offer you time on Blue Gene and other big iron. Adding cloud computing capacity would really give a huge kick to their on-demand business. Otherwise, for a lot of folks, EC2 will be more than enough. Perhaps though, IBM is differentiating itself for the suites. From the press release
IBM is developing Blue Cloud to help clients take advantage of cloud computing, including the ability of cloud applications to integrate with their existing IT infrastructure via SOA-based Web services.
Not quite RESTful behavior, IMO, the best way to leverage the web as a platform, but well aligned with IBMs services business and corporate IT environments. Does that mean Pharma might start using the cloud as well, built by IBM of course.
The other thing that jumped out at me as I saw the headline and confirmed by the time I reached the end of the article
The Grid is Dead
Yes, this essentially means that grid computing as a corporate business is dead. The future lies in the cloud.
Another observation. IBM is really serious about the Chinese, Vietnamese, etc markets
Further reading:
Press release
TechCrunch
One Trackback
[...] So we should all be looking at all these wonderful options available to us and figuring out how to leverage them. It’s sad that the life science industry has not come close to innovating in this space. Perhaps there will be some cool startup (perhaps there already is) that will prove that you can use distributed resources and maintain data integrity, security and privacy, and build successful businesses. For the enterprise, perhaps it will take an IBM to make the tide turn. [...]