Having lived and breathed in the IBM technology world for the last 10 years, I was intrigued when IBM made the announcement a few months ago (June 16th, 2009) about the CloudBurst appliance. The name of the appliance, CloudBurst, was an interesting one and what it could do almost sounded like magical. A device which can bring together hardware, software and services needed to establish a private cloud? Sounded too good to be true. Obviously, the name of the appliance suggested that It had to do something with cloud computing – a concept which is fast gaining popularity.
As part of our technology group initiative, I decided to take a deep dive into understanding the appliance, its capabilities as they relate to cloud computing and IBM technology, and ultimately how we can we position it to our customers.
In this first part of blog series on CloudBurst, I will share the device overview and its general capabilities at high level. The subsequent blogs will go in more depth in describing its practical scenarios, architecture and real world usage.
IBM CloudBurst provides everything you need to start delivering services much faster than you do today, while reducing costs and providing the benefits of a dynamic infrastructure. It is a pre-packaged private cloud offering that integrates the service management system, server, storage and services needed to establish a private cloud. This offering takes the guess work out of establishing a private cloud by pre-installing and configuring the necessary software on the hardware and leveraging services for customization to your environment. All you need to do is install your applications and start leveraging the benefits of cloud computing, like virtualization, scalability and a self server portal for provisioning new services.
Summarizing the capabilities:
- A service delivery platform that is pre-integrated at the factory
- Built-for-purpose based on the architectural requirement of specific workloads
- Delivered and supported as a single product
- Prepackaged, pre-configured servers, storage, networking, software and installation
- services needed to stand up a private cloud
IBM CloudBurst includes everything from a Self-service portal that allows end users to request their own services and improve service delivery, automation to provision the services and virtualization to make system resource available for the new services thus reducing costs significantly. This is all delivered through the integrated pre-packaged IBM CloudBurst offering which includes implementation services and a single support interface to make it easy.
In part II of this series we will go into more depth in exploring individual features of the appliance in more detail. Stay tuned…
Posts
