IBM on Thursday announced an offering called Blue Cloud meant to make it easier to run large-scale applications with massive databases over the Internet.
The computing giant said it has dedicated 200 researchers to the project and will have services available as of the first quarter next year.
The first product will be an IBM BladeCenter with Linux-based servers equipped with a suite of "cloud" software.
That includes grid-computing software, virtualization tools Xen and PowerVM, and the open-source Hadoop parallel workload-scheduling software originally developed by Yahoo. The suite will also include IBM's Tivoli data center management software for automatically provisioning hardware to adjust for fluctuating computing demand.
