Armonk (NY) and Shanghai (China) - Yesterday, IBM announced a host of upcoming products in their "Blue Cloud" lineup. These machines will be built around the Google/IBM sofware and technology partnership announced last month for Internet enabled distributed computing. Systems will literally come pre-configured with a globally accessible fabric of resources which create a real, personal Internet. Google and IBM are both investing heavily in this initiative as they believe isolated instances of personal Internets have strong potential uses for many customers.

Private Internet and Web 2.0 While all of the technology and communication infrastructure has already been place for years to allow the exact kind of implementation IBM is introducing, IBM’s value add comes from the fact that it’s made to order. IBM, in partnership with Google, plans on pre-canning all of the tools necessary for any company to have their own private Internet. According to IBM, this is a desirable situation for testing Web 2.0 applications, for example.

The idea of creating, deploying and executing entire web-based systems in a secure environment, a true, full Internet simulation, is very appealing. Companies will be able to create entire Web 2.0 systems, even Web 3.0, and Web n.0. They’ll be able to try out all kinds of new technologies that could never be tested on the real Internet (due to its distributed, and nearly unmanageable nature).

Virtualization and management software IBM has announced it’s working with corporations, universities, Internet-based enterprises as well as governmental agencies, including the Vietnamese Ministry of Science and Technology. The company claims it has devoted more than 200 researchers and engineers toward getting these systems ready for deployment in the Spring, 2008.

A Blue Cloud system was also demonstrated in Shanghai yesterday, one built using both PowerPC and x86 processors. In addition to the PowerPC / x86 versions, IBM will also introduce a z-Series mainframe version sometime late in 2008, which will have high scalability due to the large number of virtualized OSes which can be run with IBM’s System z. IBM also plans a large rack-cluster version.

Blue Cloud is based on IBM’s Almaden Research Center’s cloud infrastructure. It will be an open-source version of Linux running on Xen and PowerVM virtualization platforms. Google will provide the scalable and adaptable software infrastructure, capable of dynamically provisioning itself in response to shifting web workloads. IBM’s Tivoli management software will monitor everything in real-time, sending out tweak instructions as needed to maintain high levels of performance and throughput.

Author’s opinion IBM has taken a leap by producing a product many companies may not even realize they have a need of. When I first read about the cloud technology I thought to myself, "Okay, that’s great... but I don’t get it. All of this is possible today using isolated networks." The only significant piece of news I can truly see here is the black-box delivery system. Rather than having to assemble a complex system as a task which would likely be a lot of trial and error to get everything right, IBM is going to invest heavily in working out the details for the customer. This will enable IT decisions makers for big corporations to go to the IBM showroom and metaphorically just "pick out the color they want".

The Blue Cloud idea is certainly a novel one. I would be curious to see a financial breakdown in 2008 to see how many of these IBM shipped, and just how expensive they were. I would also be interested in hearing from some of the companies and universities who bought the equipment about exactly what they found the advantages were, as they’re still not completely clear to me.