IBM is announcing two new products that allow customers to seamlessly extend their investment in service-oriented architecture (SOA) into a cloud services environment. These new offerings enable clients to easily create application environments that can be deployed and managed in a “private cloud” and include:
* IBM WebSphere CloudBurst Appliance — a new hardware appliance that provides access to software virtual images and patterns that can be used as is or easily customized, and then securely deployed, managed and maintained in a private cloudburst
* IBM WebSphere Application Server Hypervisor Edition — a version of IBM WebSphere Application Server software optimized to run in a virtualized hardware server environments such as VMware, and comes preloaded in WebSphere Cloudburst.
With today’s announcement, IBM is empowering clients to consolidate and manage existing resources to realize the economic and technological advantages of increasingly popular private clouds. A primary benefit to customers who already have a SOA foundation is that cloud computing enables them to now reuse and share applications.
The first hardware appliance of its kind, WebSphere CloudBurst stores and secures WebSphere Application Server Hypervisor Edition images and patterns to be dispensed into a cloud. WebSphere CloudBurst helps customers easily and quickly develop, test and deploy business applications, ending the use of manual, complex or time-intensive processes associated with creating application environments. Once finished, resources are automatically returned to the shared resource pool and logged for internal charge-back purposes. WebSphere CloudBurst also manages individual user and group access, giving IT managers the right kind of access controls with optimal efficiency rates.
IBM’s WebSphere CloudBurst combines SOA with cloud services that allow our customers to work smarter,” said Jim Deters, President of Ascendant Technology. “Our customers are looking for ways to simplify their IT environments and leverage their existing assets. WebSphere CloudBurst will help them deploy and manage SOA in a cloud environment.”
These new products incorporate more than 10 years of IBM software management best practices for cost-effective, rapid, and repeatable application deployment. They also fully integrate with development and service management tools from IBM Rational and Tivoli, giving clients the seamless end-to-end support they demand.
The new IBM Rational Automation Framework for WebSphere optimizes configuration and application deployment to customize WebSphere CloudBurst patterns, providing more than 400 field-proven, automated tasks for configuration and application deployment to WebSphere Application Server environments. Using Rational Automation Framework together with WebSphere CloudBurst can improve delivery efficiencies for development, test and production scenarios leading to faster time to market, higher-quality software and rapid return on investment.
In addition, WebSphere CloudBurst integrates with Tivoli Service Automation Manager to support a more modern dynamic data center and reduces IT operational costs by automating the development and management processes for WebSphere cloud computing environments. Tivoli Service Automation Manager provides the capability to request, fulfill and manage complete software stacks for the data center and WebSphere CloudBurst complements this with intelligent, pattern-based deployment and management of WebSphere within the cloud.
For many workloads, including application testing and development, cloud computing delivers compelling economic benefits for clients. IBM Technology Services is supporting this by extending the IBM Implementation Services for Cloud Computing, an on-premise test environment for cloud applications to include services for CloudBurst that allow customers to test applications in a secure environment before going into production.
These offerings come at a time when organizations are facing a complexity and affordability crisis, in which costs to manage and power operations are becoming more expensive than the hardware and software itself. To combat this, IBM has compiled the most complete portfolio of cloud computing software and services for enterprise clients in the industry today, building on its long history in security, virtualization, standards-based innovation and large-scale computing to help clients integrate this new compute model into their enterprises.
“The WebSphere CloudBurst Appliance combines the flexibility of SOA with the adaptability of the cloud,” said Tom Rosamilia, general manager of WebSphere at IBM. “It’s new capabilities for rapid deployment deliver a fast return on investment to our clients.”
As part of its public cloud initiatives, IBM is also announcing BPM BlueWorks, a cloud-based set of strategy and business process tools. BPM BlueWorks provides business users with the collateral they need to implement business strategies within their organizations based on industry-proven business process management techniques.
IBM has a number of initiatives that allow customers to leverage IBM software in a cloud. IBM is working in collaboration with Amazon Web Services (AWS), a subsidiary of Amazon.com, Inc. to make IBM software available in the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). WebSphere sMash, Informix Dynamic Server, DB2, and WebSphere Portal with Lotus Web Content Management Standard Edition are available today through a “pay as you go” model for both development and production instances. In addition to those products, IBM is also announcing the availability of IBM Mashup Center and Lotus Forms Turbo for development and test use in Amazon EC2, and intends to add WebSphere Application Server and WebSphere eXtreme Scale to these offerings.
With more than 7,000 customer implementations worldwide, IBM is the SOA market leader. This leadership is further illustrated by a thriving community of more than 120,000 architects and developers, 300 SOA-specific technology patents, 2,000 universities advancing the SOA curriculum, and 7,420 Business Partners building SOA skills, solutions and practices.
