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IBM wraps fat tentacles around fluffy clouds

Disaster Recovery 2.0

SaaS data loss: The problem you didn’t know you had

IBM will splash $300m on 13 new data centres in 10 countries in its latest bid to fluff up cloud computing.

The tech giant announces the plans later today, but the pre-briefings show the centres are to be used for disaster recovery. Customers will house their back-ups in data vaults, which they can access very quickly over the web, in the event of a business continuity failure. Apparently, this is much cheaper than the the data mirroring of yore.

IBM has been reaching deep into its sizeable pockets all year, hungrily gobbling up storage start-ups. That sent a clear signal about the company’s intentions to climb aboard the cloud.

Since the start of 2008 it has bought Softek, NovusCG, XIV, Arsenal Digital Solutions, Diligent and FilesX.

Earlier this month IBM spent $360m on a data centre at its Research Triangle Park facility in North Carolina, and an undisclosed sum on a smaller farm in Japan, to gain a bigger foothold in the increasingly crowded cloud computing services market. ®

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Latest Comments

Kudos to the Cloud Crowd for Re-Inventing the Wheel!

One thing 30 years in the IT industry has taught me is that the more things change, the more they stay the same. Another is that the only memory we seem to access is short-term. A third is that techno-marketeers rely on that, so they can put labels like "revolutionary" and "innovative" on platforms, products and services that are mere re-inventions of the wheel ... and often poor copies at that.

A good example is all the latest buzz about "Cloud Computing" in general and "SaaS" (software as a service) in particular:

http://tinyurl.com/6let8x

Both terms are bogus. The only true cloud computing takes place in aircraft. What they're actually referring to by "the cloud" is a large-scale and often remotely and/or centrally managed hardware platform. We have had those since the dawn of automated IT. IBM calls them "mainframes":

http://tinyurl.com/5kdhcb

The only innovation offered by today's cloud crowd is actually more of a speculation, i.e. that server farms can deliver the same solid performance as Big Iron. And even that's not original. Anyone remember Datapoint's ARCnet, or DEC's VAXclusters? Whatever happened to those guys, anyway...?

And as for SaaS, selling the sizzle while keeping the steak is a marketing ploy most rightfully accredited to society's oldest profession. Its first application in IT was (and for many still is) known as the "service bureau". And I don't mean the contemporary service bureau (mis)conception labelled "Service 2.0" by a Wikipedia contributor whose historical perspective is apparently constrained to four years:

http://tinyurl.com/5fpb8e

Instead, I mean the computer service bureau industry that spawned ADAPSO (the Association of Data Processing Service Organizations) in 1960, and whose chronology comprises a notable part of the IEEE's "Annals of the History of Computing":

http://tinyurl.com/5lvjdl

So ... for any of you slide rule-toting, pocket-protected keypunch-card cowboys who may be just coming out of a fifty-year coma, let me give you a quick IT update:

1. "Mainframe" is now "Cloud" (with concomitant ethereal substance).

2. "Terminal" is now "Web Browser" (with much cooler games, and infinitely more distractions).

3. "Service Bureau" is now "Saas" (but app upgrades are just as painful, and custom mods equally elusive).

4. Most IT buzzwords boil down to techno-hyped BS (just as they always have).

Bruce Arnold, Web Design Miami Florida

http://www.PervasivePersuasion.com

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@AC (How much...)

"How much data centre will $300/13 buy you? $23 million each, how far will that go for a carbon neutral, state of the art, bomb proof building and ancillary services?"

From that list, I'd suggest just the 'art' for the 13 reception areas.

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Anonymous Coward

How much is that data centre in the window....

How much data centre will $300/13 buy you? $23 million each, how far will that go for a carbon neutral, state of the art, bomb proof building and ancillary services?

I'm only asking, because it doesn't seem that much.

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