IBM, Google Team on an Enterprise Cloud

IBM and Google "are ramping up efforts to jointly dominate what they believe will be the dominant software delivery model in the 21st Century - so called cloud computing," writes InformationWeek. The story is short on specifics, but it appears the two companies are expanding their project to build data centers to power a grid computing initiative for research universities. That effort, announced last October, was slated to start with 400 computers and eventually expand to 4,000 computers. But at yesterday's IBM Business Partner Leadership Conference n Los Angeles, it was clear that the IBM-Google alliance is building something bigger. An excerpt:

The IBM-Google cloud will run Linux, use Xen systems virtualization and Apache Hadoop. But whose data centers will house this system? IBM (IBM) has 8 million square feet of data center space, while Google (GOOG) is building huge data centers throughout the country. Is Google's data center operations expertise part of the deal? We shall see.

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