IBM invests $360 million in cloud computing

Davey Winder
Sunday, 03 August 2008 19:38

IT Industry - Market

Last week iTWire reported how HP, Intel and Yahoo! are joining forces to spearhead a global and open source test bed for the advancement of cloud computing. Now IBM has thrown a few hundred million into the technology as well...

It would appear that IBM has its head in the clouds, along with its wallet. The company has announced it has plans to build a $360 million state-of-the-art cloud computing data centre in the Research Triangle Park facility, North Carolina.

IBM intends to renovate an existing building within the RTP campus in order to create what it promises will be one of "the most technologically advanced and energy efficient data centers in the world" and which will be the first to apply IBM's New Enterprise Data Centre design principles.

The new RTP data center will form a key component in IBM's 'Project Big Green' initiative which aims to dramatically increase data centre energy efficiency. Thus offsetting escalating energy costs without impacting upon the ability to handle a rapidly rising amount of data.

IBM says that clients using this centre will "have unparalleled access to massive internet-scale computing capabilities" while gaining the cost and environmental protection advantages of its energy efficient design.

Certainly IBM has a decent enough pedigree in data centre design, owning and operating more data centre space than any other company on the planet: some eight million square feet in total.

The Project Big Green initiative means that the data centre will reuse 95 percent of the original building's shell while recycling 90 percent of materials from the original building.

Energy costs will be reduced by installing high density computing systems with virtualisation technology to run multiple software applications on the same servers.

"This new data center is part of IBM's commitment to construct the world's most advanced data centers" said Bob Greenberg, general manager of IT Optimization and North Carolina Senior State Executive at IBM, "when we open for business in late 2009, the new IBM data center assures that Research Triangle Park will be a strategic location for our outsourcing business for many years to come."