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IBM today announced that it will build an advanced datacenter in its Research Triangle Park, Raleigh, N.C., facility for $360 million. This will be the first datacenter to be built with the computer giant’s New Enterprise Datacenter design principles.
The New Enterprise Datacenter platform is a fusion of Google’s Webcentric cloud approach and the MySpace approach, with an emphasis on data-intensive parallel programming.
The datacenter will be one part of a hub for IBM’s (NYSE: IBM) computing infrastructure in the cloud that clients will be able to access anytime from anywhere. The other part of the hub is IBM’s datacenter in Tokyo, which is also being unveiled today.
Data-intensive parallel computing “turned out to be a very key element of cloud computing applications we’ve seen deployed by Facebook, Yahoo (NASDAQ: YHOO), Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) and some folks in the telecommunications industry we’ve had discussions with,” Dennis Quan, director of development, autonomic computing, with the IBM software group, told InternetNews.com.
The technologies for both datacenters were shaped by work done through IBM’s partnership with Google. The two teamed up in October to create three datacenters for academic computing using data-intensive parallel programming.
IBM’s work with Google “gave us a lot of knowledge and research to figure out the best way to bring out the cloud computing platform,” Quan explained. “The manifestation of that is our Unified Datacenter Architecture.”
According to Quan, this architecture consists of IBM’s systems technologies — virtualized networks, storage, compute resources using Xen and VMware on x86 boxes and native virtualization capabilities on power systems and the mainframe.
It also includes using Tivoli software “to drive provisioning and monitoring of systems in the datacenter, and advanced capabilities like doing chargeback and ensuring high levels of availability and storage management,” Quan added.
Next page: Befriending the environment
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Befriending the environment
The Raleigh, N.C., datacenter will leverage green computing principles. It will use many of the technologies from IBM’s Project Big Green initiative to slash energy consumption, and use the latest water-cooled and air-cooled equipment.
IBM will make heavy use of virtualization technology in the datacenter. The company plans to adopt a modular construction technology to minimize cost and environmental impact.
After the first 60,000 feet are built, additional space will be added in equal-size modules on demand. The center will be able to support 2.5 to three times as many clients as a traditional datacenter of comparable size, IBM said.
Work on the Raleigh, N.C., datacenter will begin soon, and it’s expected to be completed by next year. It will be “the biggest of the cloud centers we’ve launched,” Quan said.
Since March, IBM has launched cloud computing centers in Dublin, Ireland; Beijing, China; and Johannesburg, South Africa. The Tokyo and Raleigh, N.C., datacenters will be the vendor’s eighth and ninth datacenters, respectively.
Over time, Quan expects enterprises to increasingly leverage cloud computing at its datacenters. “We’re going to see a lot of apps come about based on SOA
Charles King, principal analyst at Pund-IT, said IBM is making “a very large investment in what’s still a very interesting, but from a commercial standpoint, an emerging technology” with its move into cloud computing. However, the datacenters “point to IBM’s strength in datacenter design and hardware strength.”
King contrasted IBM’s moves to the joint initiative announced recently by Hewlett-Packard (NYSE: HP), Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) and Yahoo to set up cloud computing labs. “They’re working on research testbeds for cloud computing, whereas IBM is moving forward with what will be commercial datacenters,” he said.
Next page: Other cloud computing initiatives
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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.
