IBM Teams with Brazil's Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation to Develop New Solution for Managing Cloud Resources

New solution will help organizations dynamically allocate computing resources to meet spikes in demand

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May 15, 2014, 09:00 ET

SAO PAULO, May 15, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced that it was selected by Brazil's Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation to develop a first-of-a-kind technology that will allow organizations to manage Cloud resources more efficiently and in real time.

Under the terms of the three year deal, IBM will work with Brazilian and foreign universities to develop the system, optimization and testing for a dynamic self-management software solution that will balance specialized and traditional resources dynamically according to business demand in real time.

Much of what is available today on the Cloud market is based on virtual machines, and most applications hosted on the Cloud are focused on data production and consumption, including retail purchase sites, blogs, traffic and weather data collection sites. These are applications that can be run on virtual machines, as they offer a good cost-benefit ratio for consumers. But there is another large range of applications that could be hosted on the cloud and requires expert, high-performance computing resources that are managed in a more complex way.

The technology that IBM is developing with Brazil's Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation can be used by businesses of all sizes, universities and government agencies – including those organizations in agriculture, healthcare, finance, city management and education - to managed computing resources during times of critical demand, and especially when demand for resources peak.

For example, a company seeking to provide a cloud-based transportation management service could offer customized routes to users depending on their preferences and activities. This service could also be run on a set of traditional virtual machines, but under unexpected circumstances requiring the rapid processing of all routes in a region affected by an emergency, processing could be quickly completed by specialized machines to meet that type of emergency demand.

Before configuring their deployments, an organization would enter its business objectives and financial restrictions, and based on that information, the platform would automatically determine if it would be possible or worthwhile to use these resources.

"A key differentiator of this system is that users will be able to specify business objectives and financial restrictions, and the platform will automatically manage resources accordingly," said Marco Aurelio Stelmar Netto, researcher at IBM Research Brazil. "Without the platform, companies have to spend more to access high performance resources that do not have the specialty they require. Selecting the resources is a hard task, but automatically taking business objectives and costs into account before making that selection will make a big difference."

About IBM Cloud Computing

IBM has helped more than 30,000 clients around the world with 40,000 industry experts. Since its acquisition in 2013, IBM SoftLayer has served 4,500 new cloud clients. Today, IBM has 100+ cloud SaaS solutions, thousands of experts with deep industry knowledge helping clients transform and a network of 40 data centers worldwide. Since 2007, IBM has invested more than $7 billion in 17 acquisitions to accelerate its cloud initiatives and build a high value cloud portfolio. IBM holds 1,560 cloud patents focused on driving innovation. In fact, IBM for the 21st consecutive year topped the annual list of US patent leaders. IBM processes more than 5.5M client transactions daily through IBM's public cloud. For more information about cloud offerings from IBM, visit http://www.ibm.com/cloud. Follow us on Twitter at @IBMcloud and on our blog at http://www.thoughtsoncloud.com. Join the conversation #ibmcloud.

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SOURCE IBM