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 Competing effectively in today's extraordinarily challenging market means more than simply maintaining the status quo—it also means developing new revenue-generating services and solutions as efficiently as possible. While organizations strive to reduce operational overhead and enhance IT efficiency, they must simultaneously seek to uncover, refine, and bring to market new ideas by spurring internal innovation wherever possible.
Toward this end, one strategy of increasing use to many organizations is cloud computing. Technologically, cloud computing works by building on traditional data center technologies (such as blade servers) by adding powerful new provisioning, monitoring, and management functionality, and thus automating the process of creating on-demand servers, which in turn serve as conceptual incubators.
| The business outcome is that, in cloud computing, organizations can achieve a next-generation platform which fosters innovation by enabling the development and exploration of new business ideas in an extremely efficient, cost-effective manner. Because servers can easily be provisioned and reprovisioned on demand, the cloud scales efficiently; processing power can be allocated rapidly, and to whatever extent is needed by the business premise. Furthermore, both IT architecture and IT management is simplified, and infrastructure resources can be shared more effectively. And perhaps most importantly, collaboration is enabled and encouraged—and innovation is the result. |
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“Currently, over ninety thousand early adopters have collaborated in creating 70 active incubations—resulting in 10 new products. IBM's success in this regard, and the technologies used to achieve it, led the company to develop Blue Cloud as a formal offering for its customers, many of whom are similarly interested in leveraging collaborative development.“
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IBM's Blue Cloud Drives Innovation—and IBM Tivoli Provisioning Manager Drives Blue Cloud
For organizations in the pursuit of these goals, IBM's new Blue Cloud offerings are optimized cloud computing solutions. Blue Cloud is a massively scalable, high-performance platform designed to handle even the most data-intensive, dynamic workloads, driven by IBM BladeCenters running either POWER or x86 processors. And because they utilize key elements of the IBM Tivoli system management portfolio—notably, IBM Tivoli Provisioning Manager 5.1—Blue Cloud offerings deliver best-in-class performance and responsiveness for maximum flexibility in the pursuit of business innovation.
How does Blue Cloud work in real time? Essentially, it generates a shared computational resource available to a large community of users, who can then tap its resources in order to explore new ideas that require technological incubation. These resources take the form of virtual servers running simultaneously on the shared BladeCenter hardware, which, in turn, is running Linux as the host operating system and Xen as the hypervisor.
The virtual servers are then dynamically provisioned by IBM Tivoli Provisioning Manager, which completely automates not only the process of creating the appropriate operating system environment within the virtual server but also adds whatever software stack is required to develop, test, and refine the new technology, strategy, or idea.
Blue Cloud Is a Proven Solution Suited for Many Different Contexts
While Blue Cloud is thus comprised of a suite of robust, proven technologies, it's also true that Blue Cloud is proven as a whole; Blue Cloud was originally developed within IBM to serve as its own, internal platform of collaboration and technology incubation. In-house developers were empowered through a portal called the Technology Adoption Program to request servers and conduct trials, and the outcome has been extremely favorable.
Currently, over ninety thousand early adopters have collaborated in creating 70 active incubations—resulting in 10 new products. IBM's success in this regard, and the technologies used to achieve it, led the company to develop Blue Cloud as a formal offering for its customers, many of whom are similarly interested in leveraging collaborative development.
One example, is the Vietnamese Ministry of Science and Technology (MoST), which among other core functions is chartered with fostering innovation among Vietnamese communities, businesses, governmental organizations, and citizens so as to enhance the quality of life in Vietnam. Blue Cloud, therefore, is an ideal platform by which such innovation can be explored and developed. The Vietnam Information for Science and Technology Advanced Information Portal (VIP), co-created with IBM, will allow Vietnamese developers to pursue new ideas to the full potential of cloud computing by utilizing the cloud infrastructure already up and running at IBM's Almaden Research Center. Subsequent stages will involve creating a local cloud within Vietnam itself.
Another example of Blue Cloud adoption comes from a partnership between IBM and Google to facilitate educational initiatives at the college level. As large-scale computing becomes increasingly prevalent, and parallel programming skills become increasingly essential, it's clear that students of computer science, electrical engineering, and other related fields must respond by developing those skills. In this way, they can better prepare themselves for emerging changes in computer architectures designed to support groundbreaking areas such as social networking, mobile commerce, and complex scientific analysis—and better contribute as developers after graduation.
Google, itself well known as a source of many cloud computing applications, will be combining its own expertise in Web computing and massively-scaled clusters with IBM's proven strengths in scientific, business, and secure-transaction computing. Several hundred computers, jointly provided by Google and IBM and driven by more than 1600 processors, will serve as a test bed for parallel programming course projects at different universities. One such, the University of Washington, has already made use of this initiative; Carnegie Mellon will be participating in the fall.
Powerful New Features Make Tivoli Provisioning Manager Even More Effective for Cloud Computing
In every deployment, of course, Blue Cloud's responsiveness and flexibility are due in part to the underlying functions of IBM Tivoli Provisioning Manager in creating virtual servers on demand. This solution is scriptable and disk-image driven, for maximum automation and convenience; servers can be created from basic images, and then tailored with specific elements such as applications, data, or drivers, starting with nothing but blank hard drives if necessary. Furthermore, the solution can help facilitate energy efficiency mandates by putting idle servers in standby, then reactivating them on demand—a feature which is particularly applicable to massively-parallel computational initiatives.
Nor does the IBM Tivoli Provisioning Manager value premise end there; it has recently been enhanced with several powerful new features designed to make it even more effective in a cloud computing context.
One such, for instance, is Web Replay, which allows experts in the software to record any sequence of mouse clicks or entered text during the configuration process, then replay it automatically on demand. Web Replay thus helps to fulfill the promise of cloud computing by adding another dimension of automation and acceleration of the provisioning stage of server creation. Similarly, the solution's deployment process has been accelerated through an improved wizard, which automatically verifies that a suitable environment exists prior to installation—reducing the initial implementation time and speeding time-to-value for the overall Blue Cloud offering.
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