Tue, Jun 16, 2009 page10

• IBM to help its corporate customers into a cloud

  • NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
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  In 2000, the Linux operating system was a hot technology, but it had not spread much beyond scientists, researchers and computer programmers. Then IBM declared that it would back Linux with investment, research and marketing, and the technology moved swiftly into the corporate mainstream.

  The same thing happened with the personal computer in the early 1980s, when IBM endorsed that upstart technology and entered the market.

  Starting this week, IBM is returning to the same playbook, introducing some initial products and services and a roadmap for its stable of corporate and government customers to comfortably embrace cloud computing.

  Cloud computing — in which vast stores of information and processing resources can be tapped from afar, over the Internet, using a personal computer, cellphone or other device — holds great promise in the corporate market. The cloud model, analysts say, has the potential to cut the costs, complexity and headaches of technology for companies and government agencies.

  Already, Amazon.com, Google and Salesforce.com, among others, offer cloud-based Web services to companies, including e-mail, computer storage and customer management software. But many big companies and government agencies have been reluctant to get on board because of traditional corporate-computing concerns like the security of data, reliability of service and regulatory compliance.

  “IBM knows how to do all of those things,” said Frank Gens, chief analyst for IDC, a technology research firm. “Its strategy is all about making cloud computing safe for enterprise customers.”

  Even if IBM succeeds in its bid to make cloud computing more palatable for big corporations, there is no guarantee that it will be the main beneficiary of the trend. After IBM helped create the PC industry, lower-cost competitors ended up dominating the business.

  In the cloud market, IBM plans to take a tailored approach. The hardware and software in its cloud offerings will be meant for specific computing chores. Just as Google runs a computing cloud optimized for Internet search, IBM will make bespoke clouds for computing workloads in business.

  Its early cloud entries, scheduled to be announced yesterday, follow that model. One set of offerings is focused on streamlining the technology used by corporate software developers and testers, which can consume 30 percent or more of a company’s technology resources.

  The second set is virtual desktop services, in which personal computer software, either from Microsoft or open-source alternatives, is run on remote servers and piped to simple desktop machines equipped with screens and keyboards. IBM found in tests with clients that such virtual PCs, with little desktop processing or storage, can use 70 percent less power than conventional PCs and reduce technical support costs by up to 40 percent.

  Both the software development and desktop services are being offered as an integrated bundle of hardware and software for a cloud running inside a corporate or government data center, or as a cloud service hosted in an IBM data center.

  Other offerings are planned, IBM executives said, including clouds fine-tuned for data storage, and clouds for business analytics, which is software that analyzes data for patterns of customer behavior, market trends and other potentially valuable information.

  IBM calls its approach of fine-tuning hardware and software for specific jobs “hybrid computing.” And it will open a Hybrid Computing Research laboratory later this year, inviting industry and university scientists to work cooperatively on new application-specific designs intended to improve performance by between 100 and 1,000 times compared with today’s systems.

  The fresh look at computer design is being prompted by the surge in Internet data, from social networking to smartphone applications to sensors monitoring food shipments and electrical use. By 2011, IDC estimates, there will be 1 trillion Internet-connected devices, up from 500 million in 2006.

  “This huge explosion of data is driving a movement to design systems around workloads because it is the only way to deliver the computation needed and it’s far more energy-efficient,” said Kunle Olukotun, a computer scientist at Stanford.

  IBM had an initiative, begun early last year, called Blue Cloud, which mainly involved adapting its server computers for cloud technology.

  Most major technology suppliers have cloud-related hardware and software products, including Cisco, Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems and Dell. But IBM, analysts say, is going further by offering simplified, integrated stacks of hardware and software, as well as cloud services.

  IBM’s cloud strategy, the company said, is the culmination of 100 prototype projects with companies and government agencies over the last year, and its research partnership with Google.

  “The information technology infrastructure is under stress already, and the data flood is just accelerating,” IBM chief executive Samuel Palmisano said. “We’ve decided that how you solve that starts by organizing technology around the workload.”

  One of IBM’s test beds for cloud computing has been the Interior Department’s National Business Center, a service center that handles payroll, human relations, financial reporting, contracting services and other computing tasks for dozens of federal agencies. The center runs two large data centers, one in Northern Virginia and another outside Denver, Colorado.

  Douglas Bourgeois, the center’s director, said he was introducing several cloud-style applications over the next nine months including Web-based training and staffing and recruitment software. And in tests with financial and procurement software, the cloud-computing environment has delivered efficiencies of between 40 percent and 60 percent in productivity and power consumption, he said.

  “For us, like other data centers, the volume of data continues to explode,” Bourgeois said. “We want to solve some of those problems with cloud computing, so we don’t have to build another US$20 million data center.”
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