IBM's big, fluffy, Blue Cloud (and UF iBrick)

It's IT Blogwatch: in which IBM announces its Blue Cloud effort. Not to mention User Friendly's take on bricked iPhones...

Todd R. Weiss and James Niccolai tag-team:

In a move to create more robust, scalable computing systems that can power the expanding needs of new Web 2.0 and mobile applications, IBM today said it will unveil its first enterprise-ready cloud computing hardware in the first quarter of next year ... blade servers running x86 and IBM Power processors, followed later by System z mainframes and a cloud environment based on highly dense rack clusters ... to link together large pools of systems that specifically are aimed at handling the design and performance needs of emerging Web 2.0 and mobile applications. [more]

Joe Fay adds:

At first glance the plan is as diffuse as the name suggests. IBM describes it as “as series of cloud computing offerings” which will allow data centres to behave “more like the internet by enabling computing across a distributed, globally accessible fabric of resources” ... [IBM] is tying together its management and virtualisation tools to allow workloads to be dynamically allocated and provisioned across its various hardware platforms. [more]

Marshall Kirkpatrick 'splains:

More than just a beautiful turn of phrase, cloud computing is a paradigm that leverages a distributed architecture to carry out massive processing tasks online, instead of on a single computer. The program, called Blue Cloud, is set to compete at least indirectly with Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud, or EC2. In theory, cloud computing will usher in an era wherein innovation based on massive data processing becomes affordable for almost any company, no matter how small. [more]

Yes, yes, but what is it? Here's Erick Schonfeld:

It is based on an open-source project called Hadoop that manages computing resources across large clusters of computers ... [like the] 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. [more]

Rich Miller helps out, too:

Hadoop is all about scalability. Hadoop is a framework for running applications on large clusters of commodity hardware. It was originally built to power to build a search index for the Nutch project, and semantic search startup Powerset has been building its index using Hadoop on Amazon's EC2 utility computing platform. Hadoop uses Google's published computing infrastructure, specifically MapReduce and the Google File System ... Yahoo now employs Hadoop lead developer Doug Cutting. On Tuesday Yahoo announced that it had assembled a 4,000 CPU Hadoop grid for use by researchers at Carnegie Mellon. [more]

Dana Gardner muses:

[IBM] not only talks the services talk, but walks the services walk. We are all at the tipping point where IT will be delivered of, by and for services ... the king of mainframes and distributed computing moves the value expectations yet again -- to the pre-configured cloud architecture. The standards meet the management that meets the utility that gets the job done faster, better, cheaper. Slap an IBM logo on it and take it to the bank. [more]

Shane Schick shizzles:

Try pitching your “cloud” strategy to senior management and watch their eyes glaze over. Then tell them IBM is going to do it for you and watch their ears prick up ... fter watching the pendulum swing back and forth between mainframes and client-server, IBM admits it is trying to do with cloud computing what it did with Linux: announce to enterprise IT managers that it’s officially smart to at least start considering this approach ... If companies don’t show interest in cloud computing it may be because they don’t face the kind of compute workload crisis that the likes of a major search engine or social networking site do. [more]

And finally...

• Dust Puppy sings about Greg's bricked iPhone
  

Buffer overflow:

• Tim Lee: Wireless Piggybacking Is Still Not A Problem
• Tom Olzak: Chinese espionage is greatest risk to U.S. technology
• Nate Anderson: Zune 80 scarcer than a Wii, Microsoft blames popularity
• David Morgenstern: Mac users can now give real love to Windows NTFS
• John Murrell: Did we say e-mail was the future? What we meant was, e-mail is dead
• Michael Pietroforte: Why is the Vista adoption so slow?

Other Computerworld bloggers:

• Don Tennant: A challenge for Microsoft
• Ian Lamont: Harvard takes down a Factiva-powered text-mining operation
• Michael R. Farnum: A scary encounter with an Army recruiter - data on a laptop
• Matt Hamblen: Berners-Lee for president!
• Preston Gralla: The U.K.'s hidden crime wave: Wi-Fi freeloaders
• James Barnett: Is Apple's stock worth the price?
• Skark Tank: Deja vu all over again
• Seth Weintraub: Apple Updates everything but the kitchen sink (Leopard)
• Douglas Schweitzer: Big Brother Security for Little Brother firms
• Shark Bait: Networking vs Desktop Support

Richi Jennings is an independent analyst/adviser/consultant, specializing in blogging, email, and spam. A 20 year, cross-functional IT veteran, he is also an analyst at Ferris Research. You too can pretend to be Richi's friend on Facebook, or just use boring old email: blogwatch@richi.co.uk.

Previously in IT Blogwatch:

• Sun and Oracle spar over VMs (and Chupa-WHAT?)
• Drop everything; patch Windows (and NP-complete sheep)
• Intel Penryn: better, faster, smaller, greener (and brrr!)