IBM is quickly establishing a new cloud computing identity. On Nov. 16, it revealed what it calls "the largest private cloud computing environment for business analytics in the world" and pronounced it ready for prime time.

What IBM has done, and what no one else has yet attempted, is this: Over decades, through its hundreds of thousands of employees, it has researched and archived an enormous amount of information in numerous vertical markets, garnered through solving innumerable business-related IT problems.

So the company is now putting all that stored-up intellectual property to work behind a new cloud service for use by IBM internally and for its customers' use. The amount of data is estimated conservatively to make up about a petabyte of digital storage.

Resource Library:

IBM equates this mountain of information to some 20 million four-drawer filing cabinets filled with text.

The part of this cloud for IBM's internal use, called Blue Insight, is currently gathering and storing information from about 100 corporate warehouses and data stores. It provides analytics on that estimated petabyte (1,000 terabytes, or 1 million gigabytes) of data and turns it into usable business information for IBM's sales force and development communities.

Blue Insight is a sophisticated system that runs on a System Z10 mainframe computer—one with 48 processors (32 processors for production, 18 processors for development and test environments) and strong cryptography capable of handing up to 10,000 secure transactions per second and providing redundant backup support, Michael Bradshaw, IBM vice president of Application and Infrastructure Management Optimization, told eWEEK.

Blue Insight Is Foundation for Smart Analytics Cloud

To show customers how they can adapt this model into a system designed specifically for themselves, IBM has launched a new service package based on Blue Insight called the Smart Analytics Cloud.

Combined with a customer's own data storage, Smart Analytics Cloud can extract and analyze information from data stores around the world to help users make good business decisions at the point of sale and to predict and act immediately on business opportunities, Bradshaw said.

IBM is now ready to sell the attributes of the Smart Analytics Cloud to customers old and new.