Technically it isn't supposed to be news until Noon (US Eastern) today, when it is to be announced at the big virtual worlds conference in New York City, but Reuters accidentally jumped the gun and seems to have taken the wind out of the sails of Linden Lab's and IBM's big joint announcement.
The plan, essentially, is for IBM to hold Second Life grid servers on their private corporate network, back behind the firewall, but (we gather) with enough network access to allow those servers to communicate with the central services on the Second Life grid.
This would give IBM a virtual world intranet of sorts; regions that are actively locked away from the rest of the world, but giving their employees the freedom to move between internal simulators and those that are part of the main public grid seamlessly.
It isn't yet clear whether IBM's installation will feature a satellite asset system or whether it will continue to be reliant on Linden Lab's presently limping and apparently increasingly unreliable asset cluster.
This is the first such installation of its kind. Linden Lab acknowledges that there are many trust issues between server-side components of their virtual world grid (essentially the system components largely trust any inputs and messages from other system components) which makes the notion of third-party servers and simulators quite a risky one. We assume there are all manner of precautions taken to prevent wholesale fraud or contamination.
Additionally, having physical control over the servers, IBM could easily and relatively transparently access and copy any content, software, IMs, chat, logs or data in servers they control (admittedly, though, something of a technical feat, IBM has more than enough expertise to do so at will). We assume that the arrangement includes the promise not to do so.
Likely the partnership with IBM for this project is partly about genuine usage, and partly about the collaborative exploration of the security issues, risks, colocation scaling issues and the mitigation of problems with third party installations.
IBM seems to be an excellent partner for this effort.
