IBM Unveils 'Blue Cloud' Distributed Computing PlanIBM Unveils 'Blue Cloud' Distributed Computing Plan

IBM on Thursday announced a major initiative under which it plans to offer businesses the tools and services to create large scale, distributed computing environments that transcend geographic bounds.

Under its so-called Blue Cloud program, IBM will develop virtualization tools that allow businesses to route computing tasks to areas where they can be done most efficiently, regardless of location.

For instance, a brokerage in New York that needs to use local servers to close trades could dispatch back-office number crunching to under-utilized machines in a branch office -- saving time and money.

The setup could also lend itself to hosted infrastructures in which businesses tap computer services from third parties.

IBM said it expects to roll out Blue Cloud offerings beginning in the spring of 2008. It's currently testing the program with the government of Viet Nam's Ministry of Science.

To create Blue Cloud, IBM is roping together a wide range of its products and technologies. Its Tivoli workload management software is used to balance workloads between servers on a distributed network while its BladeCenter servers provide the computing hardware.

Open source technologies also play a part: Blue Cloud will include the Xen and PowerVM virtualized Linux operating system images and the Apache Hadoop parallel workload scheduler.

IBM also said it expects to roll out a Blue Cloud environment that runs off of its System Z mainframe servers in 2008.

Distributed computing isn't a new idea, but IBM is hoping Blue Cloud will allow businesses to deploy such environments across their entire organization, quickly and easily.

"This approach could help IT managers dramatically reduce the complexities and costs of managing scale-out infrastructures whose demands fluctuate," said Rod Adkins, a senior VP in IBM's Systems and Technology Group, in a statement.