If one wants to dig into details, navigate to their smoothly designed products page <HERE> and have a look in the Whitepapers to learn something about clouds and their constraints. Or read this Grid Today article <HERE>.

I will watch them closely.

Roland

‘IBM today unveiled Blue Cloud, a utility computing initiative designed to help customers run efficient grid-based platforms in enterprise data centers.’

This is the introductionary phrase of a datacenterknowledge.com article <READIT> from last year about IBMs ‘Blue cloud’ press release. Grid, Utility and Clouds plus datacenters in one sentence is quite a challange today, where new players and commenters are popping every day. In Dells cloud blog, Jimmy Pike tries to give a definition on these three important 2008 buzzwords <READIT>. After first beeing sceptic about the definitions, I partly changed my mind. I’d put more emphasis on “Utility computing” beeing not only an idea, but more kind of marketing buzz. And I wouldn’t call clouds beeing a subset of grids.

So what is the point? How are grids and clouds working together?

Does a cloud have to be a grid?

like John Willis asks <HERE>. The answers is definitely no.

As far as my research goes at this point, grids are more focussing on the hardware, the platforms, the interoperatbility between some or many or vaste number of systemes to provide ‘Internet scale’ computing power. The term ‘grid’ is describing more or less an architectural pattern.

Clouds are more focussing on the delivery of computing services. It’s about APIs, payments and so on. Clouds are can be based on computing grids, but can also have a different system architecture like seti@HOME (p2p clouds).

IBMs press kit <SEEHERE> for the Blue cloud press release adds some more interesting points about to the discussion

IBM today unveiled plans around cloud computing, a revolutionary approach to computing that will allow corporate data centers to act with the efficiency of the Internet. IBM’s commitment to cloud computing echoes another major commitment to computing the company made in 2000 when it announced its support of Linux.

So here we learn from IBM: Clouds are about ‘internet’, ‘data centers’ and ‘computing’, which sounds like defining a new computing paradigm:

From Host over Client Server to Web based and cloud

I’ll come back to point, I promise.

Roland