How to "Blue Cloud"

IBM's announced this morning their new "Blue Cloud" product strategy and the press has been fairly accepting. The business premise is that companies (i.e. IBM customers) will be increasingly using web2.0-style applications in their data centers and will need better tools to manage these apps, their associated user-generated content and fluctuating end-user demand. Blue Cloud will be available to customers in the spring of 2008. 

With over 200 IBM researchers assigned to this new initiative, the first "blue cloud" product will combine IBM blade servers with a software suite consisting of grid computing software, Tivoli for management, Xen and PowerVM virtualization tools and open source Hadoop parallel workload scheduling software originally developed by Yahoo!.

This strategy is very complimentary to IBM's recent announcement with Google to jointly set up grids to help teach students how to write distributed applications. Users will initially need to host the hardware and software locally with a long-term option to have everything hosted and managed by IBM. The suite is designed to be flexible and dynamic to manage large changes in end-user demand.

Comments

[Aaron Tersteeg]

This seems like a competitive response to the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). http://www.amazon.com/b/ref=sc_fe_l_2?ie=UTF8&node=201590011&no=3435361&me=A36L942TSJ2AJA
Amazon already has a business model in place and is able to support it today. IBM's solution will need to leap frog the Amazon technology in order for it to really take off. I hope that the IBM team can cut loose from their traditional conservative culture and make things happen quickly.