Computer legend IBM has announced a series of cloud computing solutions for corporate data centers. The solutions family, dubbed "Blue Cloud," will enable large pools of systems are linked together to provide various IT services.

“Blue Cloud will help our customers quickly establish a cloud computing environment to test and prototype Web 2.0 applications within their enterprise environment,” said Rod Adkins, Senior Vice President, Development and Manufacturing for IBM Systems & Technology Group.

“Over time, this approach could help IT managers dramatically reduce the complexities and costs of managing scale-out infrastructures whose demands fluctuate,” Adkins said.

Blue Cloud will include support for systems with Power and x86 processors and will be managed by IBM Tivoli software which manages multiple servers to ensure optimal performance based on demand. Blue Cloud can be traced back to work IBM did in support of its own software innovators with an IBM innovation portal called the Technology Adoption Program.

IBM's first product in this series will be an IBM BladeCenter with Linux-based servers equipped with a suite of "cloud" software, which includes virtualization tools Xen and PowerVM, and the open-source Hadoop parallel workload-scheduling software originally developed by Yahoo.

The Vietnamese Ministry of Science and Technology has signed on for a pilot:

“The Vietnam Information for Science and Technology Advance Innovation Portal (VIP), created with IBM, will help provide Vietnamese communities and residents a dynamic, rich content source and foster innovation among the citizens, communities and government organizations,” said Dr. Tran Quoc Thang, Vice Minister of the Vietnamese Ministry of Science and Technology.

IBM, founded in 1889, has significant experience in supercomputing. IBM is also the largest information technology employer in the world and more patents than any other U.S. based technology company. Last week, the company announced that their Blue Gene/L supercomputer has achieved a new world record as it continued its four-year domination of the official TOP 500 Supercomputer Sites list with a sustained performance of 478 trillion calculations per second (478 "teraflops").