I used to work on an "datacenter as a service" offering from Sun (now Snoracle). We made a few cubic yards of dollars from providing datacenters for the US military to do moderately confidential processing. Most of the equipment in the buildings, though, were el-cheapo dells. They took money away in trailer-truck loads.

IBM had and has a similar offering, and similar dell envy.  I suspect this is a move to make a credible offering in the next few RFPs.

Amazon wants the same thing.

--dave

The takeover seems to be about "cloud".  IBM doesn't seem to be as big
a cloud player as they need to be.  Red Hat hasn't failed here but I
would not say that it has been a great success.  I'm surprised how
Ubuntu seems to have much more share than Red Hat, for very little
fundamental work.

-- 
David Collier-Brown,         | Always do right. This will gratify
System Programmer and Author | some people and astonish the rest
davecb@spamcop.net           |                      -- Mark Twain