IBM Locking Up Lots of Cloud Computing Patents

dkatana writes: In an article for InformationWeek Charles Babcock notes that IBM has been hoarding patents on every aspect of cloud computing. They've secured about 1,200 in the past 18 months, including ~400 so far this year. "For those who conceive of the cloud as an environment based on public standards with many shared elements, the grant of these patents isn't entirely reassuring." Babcock says, and he adds: "Whatever the intent, these patents illustrate how the cloud, even though it's conceived of as a shared environment following public standards, may be subject to some of the same intellectual property disputes and patent trolling as earlier, more directly proprietary environments."

Comments

If you can't beat 'em...

[cb88]

Become SCO!

Re:If you can't beat 'em...

[AchilleTalon]

Not exactly. Given the threat the patent trolls represents, it is of good advice for a company to patent as much as possible its own contributions and inventions in order to not have to throw the shareholders' money at lawsuits initiated by the patent trolls companies. If you were the IBM CEO you wouldn't do otherwise. It may appear outrageous, but the first responsability of the CEO is to protect the money of the shareholders and make it profitable. Clearly, getting the patents will protect the shareholders' money.

Re:If you can't beat 'em...

[ClaraBow]

IBM has a good business model and actual good products and services -- totally the opposite of SCO!

Re:If you can't beat 'em...

[AchilleTalon]

It seems you have missed the point. You patent to avoid the patent trolls to sue you claiming a patent on a thing you neglected to patent. Even if at the end you may win, you will throw a lot of money at this useless lawsuit. So, to avoid it in first place, you are better to patent everything you can.

Re:If you can't beat 'em...

[LessThanObvious]

This is why none of this should be patent eligible. It's harmful to allow software to be patented especially when the patent is overly broad and general in it's language. It's harmful to allow any configuration of systems and software to be patented. The USPTO is completely incapable of telling the difference between what's patent worthy and what's bullshit in these areas.

Re:If you can't beat 'em...

[bws111]

Except for P series (POWER), Z series (mainframe), disk storage, tape drives, and tape libraries.

Re:If you can't beat 'em...

[raftpeople]

"Even their processors are a joke" - not sure what you're smoking but the Power processors (Power5, 6, 7, 8, etc.) have been the king of the hill for large/multi-core systems for a while and still are. Xeon's are much less expensive so you can throw lots of cores at it, but there is diminishing returns. Power processors are designed for multi-core and multi-socket systems (lots of cache per core, high speed communications, etc.).

Re:If you can't beat 'em...

[bws111]

So much wrong here it is hard to know where to start.

Legacy? POWER 8 was released later year. Z13 was released 6 months ago. Z13 is a brand new design.

As for that post you linked to, let's just say the writer is an idiot. First and foremost, you can not compare MIPS numbers between two different architectures. Ever. And you can't compare MIPS numbers between two different workloads. Ever. But this bozo attempted to do just that.

Secondly, NOBODY buys the 26 MIPS model for production use. They buy it as a hot backup. By buying that model, they save a ton on both hardware and software costs, but can convert it to a full speed machine, about 150x faster, in seconds should they need to transfer workload from a primary machine. But this idiot tried to use it for productive use, and complained that it was slow. Duh.

Lastly, he complains about the disk configuration, but doesn't seem to have a clue how to set it up. All current DASD that supports CKD mode (max 9GB disk size) also supports SCSI mode. But for some bizarre reason he configures it as CKD over FICON, then complains about it. If he had a brain he would configure it as SCSI over FCP, and have up to 2TB images, which work just fine with z/VM and Linux.

Re:If you can't beat 'em...

[Anonymous Coward]

IBM HAD good products. most of their current products are poor shadows of their former glory days. They cobble together mismatched open source, propriety tech and slap a new name and interface on it and sell it for inflated costs while requiring teams of consultants to even get basic functionality out of it. Once upon a time when in doubt you went IBM, nowadays if you go IBM you better have a fucking good reason!

This cloud

[SirAudioMan]

...will eventually crash and burn. Sure it's convenient, powerful and cheap, but inherent with major security risks. If I were a company, there is no way in hell I would ever deliberately host or put anything on the cloud. I don't care how 'secure' things are, there are way to many attack vectors and unknown vulnerabilities. It's only going to get worse before people start to see if for what it truly is - dangerous!

Re:This cloud

[fyngyrz]

What about when you need a huge bunch of CPUs to compute something? That's an aspect of "the cloud" that actually seems reasonable. As long as you don't put anything you want kept secure out there, of course.

Re:This cloud

[fustakrakich]

Not true! I can't think of a safer place to keep my 15gb of [*cough*] cat pictures and movies...

Re:This cloud

[Anonymous Coward]

What about when you need a huge bunch of CPUs to compute something?

Actually that's the grid. The buzzword that preceded the cloud.

The cloud is just a way for companies with too much money and not enough brains to spin up large numbers of servers they don't need to then sit idle hosting websites nobody visits. This is my bread and butter, selling websites and virtual servers (in the cloud) to people who don't need them. It's obvious from looking at my customers near-empty weblogs that they're pissing their money away, but the web designers and site administrators like myself get paid regardless. I have evidence that these sites could be multi-tenanted 100:1 , because I also offer that as a product, but these guys insist that their website is the best thing ever, and needs it's own virtual server.

I hate my job, I hate what I do, I hate how pointless it is, but it's the only way I have to get paid, so I'm not going to stop this idiocy as long as the customers keep on asking for it. A man's got to eat.

Re:This cloud

[SuricouRaven]

It's just the abstraction of a remote server. The cloud isn't a technological innovation, though it depends a lot upon things like virtual machines to implement. It's a business model in which the customer pays for access to a computing resource, but is in no way involved in or even aware of how this resource is provided. This allows the cloud provider to benefit from economy of scale - they don't need to keep enough hardware to handle every customer at peak demand, because customers aren't all going to peak simultaneously, and they can utilize backup and storage media with a much lower per-gigabyte cost because they use it in such quantity.

That was the original idea, anyway. Because there is no real authority and cloud grew trendy, it's slapped on everything now. Cloud thermostats, cloud routers. I've even seen a NAS box with a webserver function sold as a 'personal cloud.' You might call this the 'trivial cloud.' There's still a service somewhere that the customer is using, but it's just a plain old-fashioned server.

the cloud is just a computer

[turkeydance]

and it's not yours.

They beat themselves

[fyngyrz]

the first responsability of the CEO is to protect the money of the shareholders and make it profitable

Exactly right. Add just a smidgen of shortsightedness and some pressure from the board, and you have the perfect storm of next-quarter-itis.

After a few quarters like that, the CEO takes off for the next company, as the company tries to put out the fires they left behind them -- fired experts, cheapened and crippled products, new hires that don't know much about the domain, insufficiently-tested but out-the-door-anyway products...

Yeah, responsibility to the shareholders. Which means: Short term thinking and cannibalistic profiteering. That's the US corporate mantra, right there.

"public standards"?

[darkain]

since when the hell is "the cloud" based around "public standards"!?!?!? Each and every major vendor's offerings are pretty much unique and proprietary. vSphere isnt EC2 isnt SmartOS isnt KVM isnt HyperV isnt OpenCompute. Some of these are more open than others while some are entirely closed systems.

Re:"public standards"?

[Dutch Gun]

I think you're missing a key point. "Cloud" tends to imply massive scalability on demand. For instance, if you need to to perform a finite set of large-scale computations, it would make sense to rent some temporary space for those. That's "cloud computing". Buying your own hardware would be an insane waste of money. A practical example: an company producing an MMO might purchase server space to run client simulation bots to load-test their servers prior to releasing the game.

As another example, large companies can rent you long-term storage space for FAR less money than it would cost you to maintain that storage space yourself. That's "cloud storage". For consumers AND corporations, online backup service is an absolutely killer feature of the cloud. I back up all my critical documents and source data for my little startup company on Amazon S3 servers, and it costs me under a dollar a month, since documents and source files are tiny, and you just pay for what you use.

There's another specialized but important cloud service, which is "content delivery networks". Akamai is a good example of this, as a provider that very few consumers even know about. Very few companies have the available bandwidth and distributed network that Akamai has, so it makes sense for companies to rely on a network like theirs to help handle large spikes in internet content delivery, such as they might see during major product releases.

I'm a lot less bullish on a lot of the other cloud-based hype. For instance, the notion that all these Internet of Things devices need to be directly connected to the internet instead of just your own intranet is insane. And there's a lot of modern software that's needlessly tied to "the cloud" which has very little benefit for the consumer. All it means is that your software dies when the service dies. That's the dark side of the cloud, no pun intended.

You don't need to be some cloud fanboy to realize that it does have a few killer applications that a simple LAMP server could never handle.

cloud computing ??

[Archfeld]

Do these patents actually cover 'cloud computing' or do they refer to the abortion that has become the next great marketing term/buzzword following green ??

Cloud computing used to refer to a developing technology that allowed a virtual work environments to be cobbled together from varied technologies and hardware platforms. Then suddenly storing data in someone else's server farm or data center was putting your stuff in "the cloud" and any true meaning was lost under the avalanche of marketing and salesmanship.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...