UW helped seed IBM's new cloud offerings

Excerpts from the blog

After spending five years and billions on development — including early research at the University of Washington — IBM unveiled its enterprise cloud-computing services Monday.

The company is starting with three offerings that further stretch the definition of cloud computing, a term loosely applied to big, scalable computing systems accessed on demand via the Internet.

Now IBM is offering to install "private clouds" for companies in-house, behind their firewalls.

One version is a "test cloud" that enables companies to develop and test applications in-house, instead of renting time from other companies such as Amazon.com, Microsoft or even startups such as Seattle's Skytap.

IBM is also offering a bundle of development and test tools that can be used on its cloud — a network running on 13 datacenters around the globe.

Or companies may now order a turnkey cloud-computing system from IBM, called "CloudBurst."

It's a 42-unit server cabinet that comes preloaded with hardware, storage, virtualization, networking and service-management software.

Some customers would prefer a more tailored, integrated cloud setup than a "smorgasbord of different siloed systems," said Dennis Quan, IBM's director of autonomic computing development in Raleigh, N.C.

"You have a bunch of systems that coexist in datacenters, but they don't act like a system, a single system, and enterprises spend a lot of time having to integrate the different software systems together," he said.

There's also going to be a need for more "fit to purpose" clouds, especially if datacenters are strained by the flood of new data.

Some 15 petabytes (15 quadrillion bytes) of information are being created daily — mostly by consumers — but companies are responsible for maintaining 85 percent of it, according to IBM.

Blueprints for IBM's cloud offerings came from a joint research project with Google.

It initially explored business intelligence at big schools and large-scale analytics, which led to the creation of a cloud-computing cluster at the UW and two run by IBM in 2007.

"The work that was done as part of that project really informed how we can put together large cloud datacenters that can efficiently process terabytes, petabytes, of information across thousands of machines," he said.

The early clusters also "kind of provide the blueprints for the designs we base these new clouds on," he said.

What's crucial is the service-management systems that make the cloud systems work.

Quan said it's like the orchestra conductor, or "an operating system for the 21st-century datacenter."

This material has been edited for print publication.

Brier Dudley's blog appears Thursdays. Reach him at 206-515-5687 or bdudley@seattletimes.com.