Named no. 7 most popular post in 2012 on ThoughtsOnCloud.com by @IBMCloud.
A lot of information is available about IBM SmartCloud Enterprise capabilities, but it’s not always easy to find. This blog post contains an overview of the capabilities of, and how to use and configure IBM SmartCloud Enterprise to fit your business needs and add the most value.
This blog post starts with generic information, and continues with more in-depth information on specific capabilities and use cases. The three most important sources of information, also used for most of the links in this post, are:
New to cloud computing? Read this guide, which provides a rapid and thorough grounding in cloud computing with a focus on the basic concepts; terminology definitions; types of cloud platforms, services, and products; how to start developing applications for the cloud; and connections to resources that can further expand your knowledge of the cloud.
Also check out the IBM SmartCloud page, which shows you the overview of all IBM cloud solutions, ranging from infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) to software as a service (SaaS), and from private cloud to shared cloud.
What is IBM SmartCloud Enterprise
IBM SmartCloud Enterprise is an agile computing infrastructure as a service (IaaS) solution that provides you with rapid access to an enterprise-class shared-cloud environment. Why call it shared-cloud, and not public-cloud? It’s optimized for business of any size and not intended for consumer use.
IBM SmartCloud Enterprise is well-suited for:
- A broad spectrum of born-on-the-web applications, production and non-production
- Development and test activities
- Batch processing
- Web hosting
This solution, developed for organizations that want a low-cost cloud environment suitable for running moderate-risk applications, can also help dramatically reduce the client’s IT costs.
The IBM cloud environment delivers compute options with virtual IT infrastructure support, a standard level of security for sharing physical IT resources among many tenants, and dedicated computing environments for an extra level of protection.
Getting started with IBM SmartCloud Enterprise
After you have signed up for the IBM SmartCloud Enterprise, some of the best sources of additional information are on the
support tab of the IBM SmartCloud Enterprise portal (after you have logged in):
· The support community forum is the place to go for information about system status, answers to frequently asked questions, and tips on using the system.
o Big Data
o Web workloads
o Batch workloads
o Development and Test workloads
o Collaboration workloads
o Performance Testing workloads
· The document library contains documents to help you use the tool.
· The asset catalog contains additional documentation and many technical support files.
Advanced capabilities
Image Management
IBM SmartCloud Enterprise has many
IBM software images ready to be provisioned and used in a pay as you go (PAYG) or bring your own license (BYOL) license model. There is also a list of
cloud ecosystem partner images that extend the value of the IBM SmartCloud.
You can also
import an existing image (Linux only for now) into IBM SmartCloud Enterprise to save time and effort, or import appliance images.
Storage options
Introduced in release 2.0 is a second storage tier, named object storage. With IBM SmartCloud Enterprise – object storage, you can manage your unstructured and object data, such as documents, spreadsheets, PowerPoint Presentations, audio and visual files, and email and text messages. Upload a file of any size once, from anywhere in the world and access it anywhere – as opposed to uploading the same file multiple times in multiple geographic regions.
Network security
By default, the way to connect to your IBM SmartCloud Enterprise instances is through the Internet. As an additional service, instances can also be connected to a secure connection using one or multiple virtual private network (VPN) tunnels into an IBM SmartCloud Enterprise data center and multiple virtual local area networks (VLANs) in each data center to separate instances from each other.
This developerWorks article about
setting-up VPN connections describes these two features in detail and explains how they can be used in multiple ways to meet your security requirements.
High availability and redundancy
Using the IBM SmartCloud Enterprise API´s
The API service of IBM SmartCloud Enterprise provides users with the ability to manage their instances from third-party applications. It was designed to be flexible and simple to use and implement clients for providing REST-based endpoints. Start with the
command line tool and reference binaries (CLI) for using the command line utility to work with the cloud.
Find more in-depth documents for all the API options here at the following links:
Advanced use cases
Big Data
Big Data is one of the major IT trends, so why not build part of your big data environment in the cloud? Education on which techniques are used and how to implement it can be found on the
BigData University (free registration required) here:
BD006EN – Hadoop & IBM Cloud
Backup and monitoring your instances
IBM SmartCloud Enterprise offers you a great variety of capabilities and possibilities, customer managed above the hypervisor to increase your time to market. The down side to this is that you, the customer, do need to think of basic IT necessities as any other IT environment would need, such as backup and monitoring.
Although some customers prefer to use their existing backup and monitoring solutions for their cloud images, others prefer to configure an IBM SmartCloud Enterprise instance with either a pre-build image for a task such as IBM Tivoli Monitoring, or install their choice of backup or monitoring software. Alternatively you can also use a software as a service (SaaS) solution such as Tivoli Live – monitoring services, ready to use right from the cloud.
This post was featured at ThoughtsOnCloud.com on July 19, 2012.
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