IBM Thinking Green for N.C. Datacenter - Page 3

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Other cloud computing initiatives

HP has another cloud computing initiative it launched in May. This will help enterprises build their own minicloud datacenters, complete with products and services for building out the center.

Cloud computing is fast becoming a growth area, and companies are flocking to this sector thick and fast.

In February, storage giant EMC bought Seattle-based startup Pi, using it as the nexus of its newly set-up Cloud Infrastructure and Services Division. Pi founder Paul Maritz, a 14-year veteran of Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT), became head of that division.

Maritz is now CEO of virtualization giant VMware, an EMC (NYSE: EMC) company, and sits on its board of directors. He took the post after VMware co-founder and CEO Diane Greene left abruptly.

In June, Q-layer announced the concept of a virtual private datacenter. This would let companies support on-demand cloud computing through virtual datacenters, according to a report by Enterprise Strategy Group analyst Mark Bowker. It would also let them build their own virtual environments, using a credit-based chargeback system to track resource allocation and utilization.

Also in June, Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) made its JBoss Enterprise Platform available on Amazon's (NASDAQ: AMZN) EC2. This lets users build, deploy and host enterprise Java applications and services in the cloud.

And earlier this month, RightScale and GigaSpaces teamed up to let enterprises deploy and scale data- and transaction-intensive applications on EC2, and manage them. And 3Tera lets customers run applications in their own datacenter.