IBM and European Union Launch Joint Research Initiative for Cloud Computing

Expanding its cloud computing initiative, IBM announced that it is leading a joint research initiative of 13 European partners to develop technologies that help automate the fluctuating demand for IT resources in a cloud computing environment.

The 17M Euro EU-funded initiative, called RESERVOIR Resources and Services Virtualization without Barriers will explore the deployment and management of IT services across different administrative domains, IT platforms and geographies. This cloud computing project aims to develop technologies to support a service-based online economy, where resources and services are transparently provisioned and managed.

Cloud computing is an emerging approach to shared infrastructure in which large pools of systems are linked together to provide IT services. The need for such environments is fueled by dramatic growth in connected devices, real-time data streams, and the adoption of service oriented architectures and Web 2.0 applications, such as mashups, open collaboration, social networking and mobile commerce. Continuing advances in the performance of digital components has resulted in a massive increase in the scale of IT environments, driving the need to manage them as a unified cloud.

IBM, which has been researching technologies related to cloud computing for more than a decade, kicked off a companywide cloud computing initiative in 2007 across its server, software, services, and R&D units. In November, IBM unveiled plans for “Blue Cloud,” a series of cloud computing offerings that will allow corporate data centers to operate more like the Internet through improved organization and simplicity.