The EU-funded initiative, called VISION Cloud – Virtualized Storage Services

The explosion of personal and enterprise digital data has been specifically recognized as one of the most significant characteristics of the decade. According to one estimate, 150 exabytes (billion gigabytes) of data were generated in 2005. It is estimated that this year, 1,200 exabytes will be produced. Additionally, the explosion of raw data and the dependence on data services is expected to be further amplified due to the strong proliferation of data-intensive services and the continued digital convergence of telco, media and information technology.

"The world is generating data faster than we can store it," explained Kristof Kloekner, IBM VP Strategy & Enterprise Initiatives, Systems & Software & CTO Cloud, "and we've become critically dependant on services that can extract valuable information from the data and help drive better decision making. By optimizing delivery of data-intensive storage services, VISION Cloud will usher in a new era of more flexible, scalable, and secure cloud storage that can be delivered in a pay-per-use model."

Over the last three years, IBM has been actively developing technologies related to cloud computing across its server, software, services and R&D units. Presently, IBM's cloud portfolio includes offering such as IBM Smart Business Development and Test Cloud, IBM Smart Analytics Cloud and the IBM Smart Business Storage Cloud. These offerings allow enterprises to access advanced capabilities over the cloud. The VISION Cloud represents a new initiative, led by IBM Research, to further advance cloud computing technology, making it easier and less costly to develop new data intensive services that provide security and guarantees for quality of service. 

"Users now require capabilities that are far richer than simple raw bits and basic storage," noted Dr. Hillel Kolodner, IBM Haifa researcher and lead architect for VISION Cloud. "To satisfy this need, the focus must shift to the data---where the collections of bits are semantically meaningful and have associated metadata. Data should be a first class citizen, where its importance is comparable to the computing power itself. With VISION Cloud, our aim is develop the infrastructure to support this prominence of data and data-intensive services."