IBM: Mammatus Clouds Are Us
August 2, 2008
G.K. Chesterson’s statement “There are no rules of architecture for a castle in the clouds” came to mind when I read Richard Martin’s article “IBM Brings Cloud Computing To Earth With Massive New Data Centers.” The write up is full of interesting information, and you will want to read it here.
Two points leapt from my flat panel display to my addled goose mind; to wit:
- IBM’s data centers cost about $400 million each. That’s a bargain compared to Microsoft’s San Antonio data center which cost about $650 million.
- IBM has opened centers in Dublin, Ireland; Beijing and Wuxi, China; and Johannesburg, South Africa. Mr. Martin does not tell us how many data centers IBM has.
For a company with $100 billion in revenue, IBM can build lots of data centers.
Mr. Martin reveals this juicy factoid:
IBM first opened a high-performance on-demand computing facility in New York in 2005. One advantage it enjoys over other cloud rivals like Google and Amazon, which essentially offer a do-it-yourself approach, is its army of system engineers and consultants who can assist companies in harnessing and deploying resources in the cloud.
I think of these as computing cloud type mammatus; that is, ominous looking but harmless. You can read more about mammatus clouds here. Better yet, take a gander at a mammatus and remember these clouds are toothless:
My recollection is that IBM has dipped in and out of the mammatus business a number of times. In 1996, IBM had a cloud-based Internet business. IBM sold this business to AT&T. IBM retooled and built a “grid” with a node in West Virginia. I don’t recall the details because the “grid” push drifted to the background at IBM. Now, like Hewlett Packard, IBM’s in the mammatus business–Big Blue mammatuses.
IBM is supremely confident of its position in computer-dom. The company has a deal with Google to prime the pump with parallel-savvy programmers. IBM, however, is not too good at operating certain types of businesses. My perception of IBM is a lot of regional officers selling services to hapless IBM customers and lots of consultants selling anything that fits into IBM’s very capacious services tent. Running mammatus data centers is not a core competency. I think IBM outsources its own information technology work, but I may have this backwards. IBM may perform its own IT work and charge its sister units the $750 baseline technical roll fee. As an owner of two NetFinity servers, I used my mainframe skills to master the NetFinity. Who wants to pay that much money to a 25 year old who looks up information and then follows the IBM procedure. I can do that.
I regretfully must now add cloud computing to the online initiatives that I have to track. HP, Intel, and now IBM are going to jockey for dominance in the Googlesphere. Amazing.
Stephen Arnold, August 2, 2008
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