IBM’s Blue Cloud

More cloud Computing initiatives.

IBM wants some of that Web 2.0 mojo. That is what is behind its announcement today of Blue Cloud, a set of “cloud computing” offerings that will be available to its corporate customers in the first quarter of 2008. Of course, cloud computing is just Web computing by another name. It implies massive server farms, massive storage, and the ability to support Internet-scale applications and usage patterns.

Amazon, Google, Yahoo, and Salesforce.com.com are all examples of cloud computing already available to consumers and businesses today. These are mostly in the form of specific applications, but Amazon offers its suite of Web services, which are a collection of generic cloud computing offerings—computing cycles, storage, communications. Even Salesforce.com offers its cloud computing infrastructure to other companies through its AppExchange. IBM should not have any trouble competing.

Blue Cloud is being billed as more of a distributed computing architecture than what you find in most corporate data centers. It is based on an open-source project called Hadoop that manages computing resources across large clusters of computers. Hadoop includes an open-source version of MapReduce, the same software Google uses to efficiently distribute its computing chores across its servers around the world.

So IBM is basically bringing this massive-scale computing architecture to its corporate customers. That will be good for corporate applications because this sort of distributed architecture lends itself to Web 2.0 apps, which are already invading the enterprise. The question remains as to how exactly IBM is going to implement Blue Cloud. Will it offer it on its own hosted server farms around the world or teach big company CIOs how to build their own mini-Googles across their own data centers?

My guess is it will probably be a little bit of both.

IBM’s Blue Cloud is Web Computing By Another Name

Cloud Computing from Rackspace

Another cloud computing initiative 

Last week’s incident with Amazon Web Services briefly going down may have raised questions about the reliability of cloud computing, but demand is high enough for competitors to keep trying to get into the game. The more companies that enter this space, the cheaper and more competitive that Web-scale computing should become.

Today, hosting provider Rackspace is offering a new cloud computing service through its subsidiary Mosso. (Disclosure: Rackspace is a TechCrunch advertiser). The service competes with Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), although it doesn’t require any load balancing or other administration. It also competes with Joyent and Media Temple’s Grid Service. Pricing starts at $100 a month for:

—50 GB of storage
—500 GB of bandwidth for transferring data
—3 million HTTP requests.

From there additional capacity per month costs:

—$0.50/GB of storage
—$0.25/GB of bandwidth
—$0.03/1,000 HTTP requests

This is a bit more expensive than Amazon (which charges in a different way) but a lot cheaper than the $350 to $400 a month Rackspace charges to host a dedicated server for a Website.

Mosso bills itself as a Web app hosting service. Applications are hosted on redundant server clusters (although the data center is only in one location, so something could take the whole thing out—like, say, if a truck were to run into a nearby power transformer). Coders choose what technology stack they want their apps to run on and upload their code. Mosso supports both Windows and Linux, PHP, Ruby on Rails, .Net, Perl, Python, MySQL, and SQL Server. (Amazon, in contrast, does not support Windows). Mosso does not yet support Java applications, but it is working on that. The company actually has been testing the service for nearly two years and already runs 37,000 apps.

Rackspace Offers Cloud Computing with Mosso