Amazon EC2

IBM opens four new cloud-computing centers

IBM has opened four new cloud-computing centers in Sao Paulo, Brazil; Bangalore, India; Seoul, Korea; and Hanoi, Vietnam, where there is increasing demand for Internet-based computing models.

IBM now has 13 cloud-computing centers and has dedicated more than 200 full-time researchers and $100 million to cloud computing ventures.

The benefit of cloud computing is that it gives users remote access to computing resources such as servers, storage, services and applications on demand without additional investment in new hardware.

For nearly a year, IBM has built cloud-computing infrastructures and established cloud projects in IBM cloud-computing environments.

According to IBM, in Korea, the new center will provide architecture skills and pilot projects for industries such as banking, telecommunications, government, education and IT hosting services. In India, clients such as midmarket providers, universities, telecommunications companies and government bodies will be able to access the center’s resources for pilot cloud infrastructures and applications and deliver new services to their customers.

Among the first customers to use the new centers is the Association for Promotion of Brazilian Software Excellence (Softex), which will conduct Concerto de
an on-line event to collect ideas for the 2009-2010 strategic plan for Brazil’s software industry. Earlier this year, IBM established Europe’s first cloud-computing center in Dublin, Ireland, a center in Beijing, China; one in Johannesburg, South Africa; one in Tokyo, Japan and one in Raleigh, N.C. Over the past year, IBM has provided cloud-computing services to clients such as Wuxi City in China; Sogeti, the Local Professional Services Division of Capgemini; the Vietnamese government institutions and universities; iTricity, a utility-based hosting service provider headquartered in the Netherlands; and the University of Pretoria in South Africa.

Several other companies have invested in the advancement of cloud computing, including Amazon (EC2), Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Yahoo, and VMware.

Oracle supports, licenses for Amazon EC2 cloud environments

Oracle today announced that customers can license Oracle Database 11g, Oracle Fusion Middleware and Oracle Enterprise Manager to run in a cloud computing environment.

The first products will be available for Amazon Web Services’ Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) environment. Customers can also use their existing software licenses on Amazon EC2 with no additional license fees.

Oracle intends to expand its Cloud offering to other platforms. Support and associated time lines will be based primarily on customer demand, according to Oracle’s website.

Oracle is also offering a set of free Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) so that Oracle products can be deployed to the cloud quickly. Using Oracle provided AMIs, new virtual machines can be provisioned with Oracle Database 11g, Oracle Fusion Middleware and Oracle Enterprise Linux fully configured and ready to use within minutes. Developers can use the provisioning and automated software deployment to build applications using Oracle’s development tools such as Oracle Application Express.

Additionally, Oracle Unbreakable Linux Support and Amazon Premium support is available for Oracle Enterprise Linux on EC.

Oracle is also introducing a secure Cloud-based backup solution called Oracle Secure Backup Cloud Module, based on Oracle’s tape backup management software, Oracle Secure Backup, so customers can use the Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) as their database backup destination.