IBM Cloud gets smart

Just after Apple launched it’s public iCloud, enterprise tech leader IBM unveiled its own portfolio of private cloud offerings.

IBM is unveiling a new portfolio of cloud solutions, allowing organizations to move beyond virtualization to quickly deploy and manage private clouds.

The SmartCloud Foundation portfolio contains a core set of private-cloud functions distilled from thousands of IBM client engagements and millions of cloud-based transactions IBM manages every day. The portfolio is designed to help both entry-level firms and more sophisticated clients quickly adopt private clouds from scratch or transform their current virtualized systems into highly efficient cloud infrastructures.

Demand for private clouds is expected to double as many organizations look for ways to gain greater flexibility from their computing resources while still maintaining control of their data. Forrester predicts the private cloud market to rise from $7.8 billion in 2011 to more than $15 billion in 2020.

For example, North Carolina State University’s open source cloud computing solution, the Virtual Computing Laboratory (VCL), integrates some of IBM’s private cloud software to offer better computational and educational services to students and faculty. VCL gives the university’s staff the ability to offer group or long-distance technical learning programs, among other resources, securely and on demand over the Internet.

‚NC State is offering services beyond what many other universities can provide with a traditional IT infrastructure,‚ said Dr. Mladen Vouk, professor and head of the Department of Computer Science at NC State. ‚We’re better preparing our students for jobs that integrate business with technology. VCL enables us to give our students and faculty more and better resources in the classroom, in teaching and research laboratories, and at home.‚

The SmartCloud Foundation portfolio contains these offerings:

· IBM SmartCloud Entry solution, delivered by IBM Starter Kit for Cloud, offers the building blocks to create private clouds on virtualized IBM System x and Power Systems hardware. The solution provides simplified initialization and administration for cloud environments on Power and x86 systems, standardization of virtual machines, and improved operations productivity with an easy-to-use, self-service interface. Organizations can also quickly and easily scale to more advanced cloud solutions as business demands and workloads increase.

· IBM SmartCloud Provisioning software offers a powerful provisioning engine and image management system to dynamically create or provision virtual machines. The software can create hundreds of virtual machines in less than a minutes and scale to more than 4,000 virtual machines in less than an hour.

¬∑ IBM SmartCloud Monitoring applies its industry-leading monitoring expertise to provide greater visibility into the performance of virtual and physical environments: storage, network and server resources. The software contains business- and technical-policy analysis to enable better capacity planning and workload placement. The software’s predictive and historical analytics help IT staff prevent outages of cloud services while reducing operational, licensing and capital costs.

‚IBM has applied its decades of client experience with data centers to help clients take advantage of the private cloud opportunity quickly and easily.‚ said Scott Hebner, vice president, IBM Software Group. ‚We designed the SmartCloud Foundation to have the essential elements to build, and, importantly, manage private clouds with the greatest ease.‚

These new SmartCloud Foundation technologies join IBM’s private cloud offerings such as:

· Workload-optimized appliances that are preintegrated with hardware, storage, networking, virtualization and service management software to create private clouds:

· Hybrid cloud solutions that link private and public cloud data in a secure way: and

· A workload-deployer appliance that provides access to software virtual images and patterns critical to private clouds.

IBM is enabling Business Partners to take to market its portfolio of cloud solutions. IBM also provides training to its more than 130,000 partners and resellers, giving them the tools they need to customize IBM cloud solutions to meet specific client needs and requirements.

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