IBM wants some of that Web 2.0 mojo. That is what is behind its announcement today of Blue Cloud, a set of “cloud computing” offerings that will be available to its corporate customers in the first quarter of 2008. Of course, cloud computing is just Web computing by another name. It implies massive server farms, massive storage, and the ability to support Internet-scale applications and usage patterns.
Amazon, Google, Yahoo, and Salesforce.com.com are all examples of cloud computing already available to consumers and businesses today. These are mostly in the form of specific applications, but Amazon offers its suite of Web services, which are a collection of generic cloud computing offerings—computing cycles, storage, communications. Even Salesforce.com offers its cloud computing infrastructure to other companies through its AppExchange. IBM should not have any trouble competing.
Blue Cloud is being billed as more of a distributed computing architecture than what you find in most corporate data centers. It is based on an open-source project called Hadoop that manages computing resources across large clusters of computers. Hadoop includes an open-source version of MapReduce, the same software Google uses to efficiently distribute its computing chores across its servers around the world.
So IBM is basically bringing this massive-scale computing architecture to its corporate customers. That will be good for corporate applications because this sort of distributed architecture lends itself to Web 2.0 apps, which are already invading the enterprise. The question remains as to how exactly IBM is going to implement Blue Cloud. Will it offer it on its own hosted server farms around the world or teach big company CIOs how to build their own mini-Googles across their own data centers?
My guess is it will probably be a little bit of both.
“Will it offer it on its own hosted server farms around the world or teach big company CIOs how to build their own mini-Googles across their own data centers?”
I know you’ll never believe this, but we’ve worked with IBM accounts. IBM is in the FSF as a corporate partner. I’ve spoken to them on a few occasions.
With that being said, simply opening a customer file at IBM is $500,000 MINIMUM. This is not Amazon S3. LOL.
I would be shocked if you get 1 IBM customer reading Techcrunch per month, or year.
For 500k you could buy a massive computing cluster and a minimum OC-48 line. The fact that it’s managed is attractive, but just like Metronome and the other stuff at IBM, the prices are for enterprise, it’s out of Techcrunch’s league completely.
The IBM apache dump of hadoop is the same paradigm as the Websphere/Tomcat and Apache WS distributions. My guess is that a whole bunch of hacker kids are going to use it just like Tomcat and Apache WS. Namely JBoss and Red Hat.
IBM is changing.
500k is not a lot of money when your dealing with large volumes. If they get 100 000 customers paying 300$ / month (which is nothing for their existing customers), they’ve got a new 30million / month cash flow.
not a lot of money.
“500k is not a lot of money when your dealing with large volumes.”
IBM is 1rst tier. They don’t do retail. They release stuff worth billions under the Apache project for the little people like Novell and Red Hat and of course us.
“Amazon offers its suite of Web services, which are a collection of generic cloud computing offerings—computing cycles, storage, communications.”
I don’t really see how IBM is changing the game much as compared to what Amazon EC2 is already doing. Amazon offers more than just computing cycles although I guess you can call it that in the bare essence of EC2. IBM seems to just be adding a layer of proprietary application layer over their OS to be able to charge the 500k minimum pricing.
The point of scalable cloud computing is that you can use as much as you want and as little as you want depending on the need. IBM is just cherry picking that model by keeping what they like (as much as you want) and eliminating what they don’t like (as little as you want).
“the prices are for enterprise, it’s out of Techcrunch’s league completely”
We’re not interested in buying the stuff, just writing about it
And you’d be surprised who reads TechCrunch. But to your bigger point, Chris R., IBM is in a different league than Amazon on the high-end. And I am pretty sure it will make a lot more money than Amazon ever will on these types of services.
Still, it will be interesting to see if it tries to chase Amazon on the low-end with a cheap, self-serve model. But that is not really its style. IBM is all about the hand-holding.
“Still, it will be interesting to see if it tries to chase Amazon on the low-end with a cheap, self-serve model.”
IBM self-serve is FOSS.
http://www.flic...N03/1417844632/
plus
hadoop
plus
RHEL5
and voila. That is what the little people will be running. Except we are slightly bigger than the littlest of little people, so we have our own distributed computing system, hand made from scratch.
S3/E2 is for students and basement.Office branch style businesses can get the cheapo hardware you need to run FOSS distributed computing. They won’t even pay Red Hat. They will cheap out completely and use CentOS for free and hire a support tech, or us.
You won’t run a small office exchange server on a distributed file system.
There’s of course people that make programs like Sony @home for cancer research, and the SETI application, but those people grab CPU cycles from end users as work packets. They don’t want to pay, because they are NPOs.
I can see a school being too small or understaffed to have a distributed cluster and using E2 services, but then why have a distributed computing class at all?
“IBM is all about the hand-holding.”
Having worked with IBM, I will say that they are a Galaxy Class (in caps) software company. They really take their jobs seriously and they know their stuff. Really different than %99.99999 of the companies listed on TechCrunch. That’s part of why I thought this article didn’t fit too well here.
Maybe is all the tequilas I had at lunch; or maybe is all that oil spilled on the SF bay…but:
What is the difference between Blue Cloud and SaaS? Yes, you will have all those server farms ready to be accessed from afar, but there must be some software running on them. either ORCL databases (oops, sorry Informix/DB2), SAP applications, eBay’s electronic merchant, etc…
My point is: Big Blue doesn’t sell PC’s for SMB’s. They are not Dell.
Will IBM assemble big data centers and rent space/processing time to SMB’s, chaging for space/storage/apps selected, or will they try to sell their Blue Cloud idea to big enterprises, so they change their infrastructure to a Web 2.0 / SaaS model?
Either way, the point is made: Install base/In-house is, like, soooo 80’s.
SaaS / Web 2.0 is soooo “green”…
Divisions within IBM still have the agility to skip alongside the ocean of smaller web companies.
IBM just has bigger sails.
Having been using EC2 for 3 months I am not sure why it has the reputation of it being a low end service. I think people who write for blogs tend not to have any first hand experience and just go by the collective second hand knowledge gathered by reading other blogs and reviews. New York Time recently just completed a 100 EC2 instance job by converting their entire back catalogue of public domain content dating back to 1851. S3 is also hosting all of the files live as they serve them from the nyt site. Just because a service is reasonably priced doesn’t mean it is for startups and basement shops. The entire approach of hand holding is fine but it is very old versus new school business. The hand holding can easily be a value added service that IBM offers without offering a true scalable platform.
Cloud? hmmmm I wonder where they got that from?
http://fakestev...er.blogspot.com
The Future is in the Cloud! A Microsoft Cloud!
Most of you have certainly heard or read about the world-changing speech I gave at the MS Partner Conference! I said:
“We are in the process today of building out a services platform in the cloud,”
Yes, we have seen a future, a bright future where you no longer have to buy software, you rent it. You won’t have to worry about illegal software, media, music etc… being on your PC, we will remove it for you. You won’t have to worry about backing-up your personal documents, we will keep them for you in our cloud! Why bother with these things when we can do it all for you? The future is coming, and the key word we see for it is “conformity”, Software as a service, constant monitorting, security assured. We will talk more in the next few months, I know you are all as exicited about this new direction as I am.
Watch my speech here: https://partner...ft.com/40044112
EC2 and the many other related services offered by Amazon are, by no means, a low end service. Anybody that has done serious work on it can attest to that. While startups are especially attracted to the conditions and model offered by AWS (Amazon Web Services), I would definitely stress what the previous post already said: the fact that it is reasonably priced does not mean that it is only for startups or basement shops.
The main difference between Blue Cloud and AWS, I believe, is that while Amazon offers an array of very good services to create highly scalable systems, they don’t directly offer complete solutions to create and deploy your sites. Instead they rely on an ecosystem of other companies that can provide that service for them such that Amazon can offer more and more of these basic underlying services and can really focus on making them even better. On the other hand, IBM is going to target very large clients that want a complete solution to create and deploy their application or site. The fact that they target different markets doesn’t mean that one is “higher end” or better than the other one.
“The fact that they target different markets doesn’t mean that one is “higher end” or better than the other one.”
I disagree. One has the volatile internet business model of guesstimating and the other is a solid business model.
I really hope IBM gets into this and becomes competitive with AWS.
I would like my business to be able to use both providers for redundancy.
cbmeeks
http://cbmeeks.blogspot.com