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The term “Cloud Computing” has been a buzzword in the industry for sometime now and IBM (News - Alert), being involved in this space for about 2-3 years, has seen it really take off. The company announced today new cloud computing services that will help businesses of all sizes take advantage of this computing model. IBM is providing its industry-specific consulting and technology record to offer secure, practical services to companies in the public, private and hybrid cloud models.

 

Dennis Quan, Director of Autonomic Computing, IBM Software Group gave TMCnet a little history of cloud computing for its self-proclaimed Year of Cloud Computing.

 

He started, “You look at what’s been going on out there with Web 2.0 and the mobile space, there have been more and more of these Web 2.0 applications taking off with things like Flicker and YouTube (News - Alert) and such but what you see is not just that they have been able to attract millions of users to these sites but that users are contributing information into these sites and exchanging information and doing social networking and that’s all part of the Web 2.0 phenomenon.”

 

Gartner (News - Alert) Research report “U.S. Data Centers: The Calm Before the Storm,” the company indicated that most data centers will spend as much on energy as they do on hardware in the next five years, moreover, smaller organizations will want new ways to grow and expand their businesses without falling victim to these same issues.

 

Cloud computing, a network-delivered services and software, can save customers up to 80 percent on floor space and 60 percent on power and cooling costs, and deliver triple asset utilization Numbers based on IBM client implementations, the company said in a statement.

 

“With a cloud environment we can easily run a Web server or a data base server and have that be a national part of our environment to support these user facing applications,” explained Quan. “You’ve seen a much bigger trend toward data center efficiency and this turns out to be a very big use case for cloud computing as well. Customers have been coming to use for the past couple of years…trying to understand how they can lower the costs of running data centers that are big a sprawling and constantly getting new machines get put into them. But they are running out of space to put these new machines, there’re looking at the energy and managing costs for managing large numbers of machines and they are also realizing of course that the machines that there’re running may be at five to ten percent level of utilization which is pretty bad given that they are running out of space to put new machines.”

 

He continued, “In cloud computing a move towards having data centers with a very efficiently managed set of machines using a common management infrastructure and generally these machines tend to be co-located…with cloud computing it’s more about getting a set of machines into a data center and to be able to run the operations of your service a lot more efficiently.”

 

Services to be offered by IBM are:

 

 

"Neighborhood Centers is dedicated to helping citizens cope with disruption and plan for contingencies in life – as second responders in emergencies we simply cannot afford to be shut down, or slowed down, by a data loss," said Tom Comella, chief information officer, Neighborhood Centers Inc. "IBM cloud services were critical in our community recovery efforts following Hurricane Ike. Since we experienced no business interruptions in any of our 20 facilities, we were able to focus on bringing the community, our services and our citizens back online. But the benefits of cloud services reach far beyond disaster recovery. Better data protection - demonstrating that we are good stewards of information - has become a selling point for us in willing contracts."

 

How will these cloud computing services be set up?

 

Quan told TMCnet that, “for a cloud computing environment, you generally need to have a substantial number of machines although you can actually scale down a cloud to a relatively small amount of machines and still be able to get some of these benefits. With those set of machines you’re going to need to have a virtualization layer and a service management layer that allows you to dynamically schedule work loads and lets you to more resources, depending on business priorities. IBM has called this The “New Enterprise Data Center,” it’s an architecture for putting together a data center. It doesn’t say precisely how you deploy those resources though, for example one of the things that we find to be a very important concept in the cloud computing space is the difference between public clouds and enterprise clouds. So, public clouds are companies that are service providers that run a cloud computing environment so that they can provide services for their external clients. These generally take the form of the infrastructure as a service, or SaaS (News - Alert), where the clients are all external to the service provider.”

 

To ensure its adoption, IBM initiated a company-wide project to form unified and comprehensive security architecture for cloud computing environments. It spans Systems, Software, Services and IBM's lauded Research and X-Force arms, while the aim is to re-architecting and re-designing technologies and processes, to infuse security and shield against threats and vulnerabilities, stated the company.

For more information on IBM’s cloud computing initiatives, please visit www.ibm.com/cloud. The IBM “Resilient Cloud” logo program will be available in early 2009.

 

Dennis Quan is Director of Development in IBM's Autonomic Computing division. He launched the IBM/Google (News - Alert) Cloud Computing partnership in October 2007, Dennis assisted in the creation of the IBM Blue Cloud initiative announced in November 2007, a multi-year effort spanning software, hardware, and services offerings for supporting clients' adoption of Cloud Computing technologies.

 

IBM has cloud computing centers in Silicon Valley Lab, California; Almaden Lab, California; Beijing, China; Jonannesburg, South Africa; Tokyo, Japan; Raleigh, North Carolina; Bangalore, India; Seoul, Korea; Sao Paolo, Brazil; Vietnam; Dublin, Ireland; and Wuxi, China. Eleven of thirteen are operated by IBM while two were built for customers so they, in turn, can offer Cloud services.