IBM Launches Project Blue Cloud

Computer giant IBM has announced a dedicated research project named Blue Cloud on 15th Nov 2007 ,Thursday.The company says that 200 researchers has been employed in the project and their aim is to devise a new technique in order to run large scale programs and massive databases over the internet and it is expected to be functional since the first quarter of the next year.
The first product will be an IBM BladeCenter with Linux-based servers equipped with a suite of cloud softwares.That includes grid-computing software, virtualization tools Xen and PowerVM, and the open-source Hadoop parallel workload-scheduling software originally developed by Yahoo. The suite will also include IBM's Tivoli data center management software for automatically provisioning hardware to adjust for fluctuating computing demand.IBM and Google last month announced a plan to set up a few of these server infrastructures to help college students learn how to write applications that could run on hundreds or thousands of servers.
Initially, customers will run the hardware-software bundle internally. But IBM is also looking at offering outsourced computing services based on the Blue Cloud suite, said Dennis Quan,chief technology officer of high performance on demand solutions at IBM.It builds on the much-discussed notion of outsourced utility-computing services by using the most current software, notably virtualization. Also, the suite is designed to handle changes in computing demand driven by end users, such as a large number of mobile users coming online at the same time, he added.