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Opening Up the Cloud

With OpenStack, cloud computing becomes easily accessible to everyone. It tears down financial barriers to cloud deployments and tackles the fear of lock-in. One of the main benefits of OpenStack is the fact that it is open source and supported by a wide ecosystem, with contributions from more than 200 companies, including Canonical and IBM. Users can change service providers and hardware at any time, and compared to other clouds using virtualization technology, OpenStack can double server utilization to as much as 85 percent. This means that an OpenStack cloud is economical and delivers more flexibility, scalability, and agility to businesses. The challenge however lies in recruiting and retaining OpenStack experts, who are in high demand, making it hard for companies to deploy OpenStack on time and on budget. But BootStack, Canonical’s managed cloud product solved that problem by offering all the benefits of a private cloud without any of the pain of day-to-day infrastructure management.

Addressing the Challenge of Finding OpenStack Experts

Resourcing an OpenStack six-strong team to work 24×7 would cost between $900,000 and $1.5 million and can take months of headhunting. Thus the savings that OpenStack should bring companies are eroded so Canonical created BootStack, short for Build, Operate, and Optionally Transfer. It’s a new service for setting up and operating an OpenStack cloud, in both on-premises and hosted environments, and it gives users the option of taking over the management of your cloud in the future.

After working with each customer to define their requirements and specify the right cloud infrastructure for their business, Canonical’s experienced engineering and support team builds and manages the entire cloud infrastructure of the customer, including Ubuntu OpenStack, the underlying hypervisor, and deployment onto hosted or on-premises hardware. As a result, users get all the benefits of a private cloud without any of the pain of day-to-day infrastructure management. For added protection, BootStack is backed by a clear SLA that covers cloud availability at the user’s desired scale as well as uptime and responsiveness metrics.

 

Source: http://blog.softlayer.com/2015/opening-cloud

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Semantics: “Public, “Private,” and “Hybrid” in Cloud Computing, Part I

What does the word “gift” mean to you? In English, it most often refers to a present or something given voluntarily. In German, it has a completely different meaning: “poison.” If a box marked “gift” is placed in front of an English-speaker, it’s safe to assume that he or she would interact with it very differently than a German-speaker would.

In the same way, simple words like “public,” “private,” and “hybrid” in cloud computing can mean very different things to different audiences. But unlike our “gift” example above (which would normally have some language or cultural context), it’s much more difficult for cloud computing audiences to decipher meaning when terms like “public cloud,” “private cloud,” and “hybrid cloud” are used.

We, as an industry, need to focus on semantics.

In this two-part series, we’ll look at three different definitions of “public” and “private” to set the stage for a broader discussion about “hybrid.”

“Public” v. “Private”

Definition 1—Location: On-premises v. Off-premises

For some audiences (and the enterprise market), whether an infrastructure is public or private is largely a question of location. Does a business own and maintain the data centers, servers, and networking gear it uses for its IT needs, or does the business use gear that’s owned and maintained by another party?

This definition of “public v. private” makes sense for an audience that happens to own and operate its own data centers. If a business has exclusive physical access to and ownership of its gear, the business considers that gear “private.” If another provider handles the physical access and ownership of the gear, the business considers that gear “public.”

 

Source : http://blog.softlayer.com/2015/semantics-public-private-and-hybrid-cloud-computing-part-i

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Meet the Integrated IBM Cloud Platform: SoftLayer and Bluemix

Did you know that you can complement your SoftLayer infrastructure with IBM Bluemix platform-as-a-service? (Read on—then put these ideas into practice with a special offer at the end.)

When you pair Bluemix with SoftLayer, you can buy, build, access, and manage the production of scalable environments and applications by using the infrastructure and application services together.

Whether you need insight on the effectiveness of a multimedia campaign, need to process vast amounts of data in real-time, or want to deploy websites and web content for millions of users, you can create a better experience for your customers by combining the power of your SoftLayer infrastructure with Bluemix.

Bluemix solutions and services allow you to:

  • Optimize campaigns in real-time based on customer reaction using Watson Personality Insightsand Insights for Twitter.
  • Run scalable analytics using Streaming Analytics to retrieve results in seconds.
  • Improve outcomes with Watson Alchemy API and Retrieve and Rank paired with high performance bare metal servers.
  • Automate hundreds of daily web deployments using SoftLayer and Bluemix APIs.
  • Securely store, analyze, and process big data using Cloudant database service with Apache Spark.

You can see the value of an integrated SoftLayer/Bluemix experience by looking at insights and cognitive, big data and analytics, and web applications.

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Source: http://blog.softlayer.com/2016/meet-integrated-ibm-cloud-platform-softlayer-and-bluemix