IBM Global Technology Services
Data Sheet
IBM SmartCloud
Enterprise infrastructure
as a service
Increase business agility and cost efficiency with cloud
computing for enterprises and their partners
Highlights
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Enables enterprises to reinvent their business approaches by helping to reduce the
lead time and economic risk associated
with launching new business applications
Helps reduce costs by providing an alternative to owning and maintaining physical
server, storage, and network infrastructures with extensive supporting software
Provides a flexible, feature-rich virtual
IT infrastructure on which enterprises and
their partners can rethink their IT solutions
Offers the level of security, reliability and
control that enterprises require from a
cloud infrastructure
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Today’s dynamic business environment is challenging. To support it, you
need a cost-effective, agile IT infrastructure to drive new services and
applications to market more quickly. But setting up and maintaining your
own IT infrastructure to meet these needs can mean high up-front capital
expenses and operational costs as well as poorly utilized infrastructures
that are difficult to reallocate in response to unpredictable or intermittent
workloads. Application development and test activities often suffer from
insufficient test environments, resulting in prolonged development cycles
and quality issues. Cloud computing can help you cope with these challenges, but you need a cloud infrastructure that offers enterprise-class
flexibility, security, reliability and control.
With IBM SmartCloud™ Enterprise, you gain access to an infrastructure
as a service (IaaS) cloud that enables you to deploy new servers and
storage environments across the globe in minutes (as opposed to weeks
or months) and pay for them only for as long as you need them. You
have virtually no up-front capital expenses, and, with almost no infrastructure to maintain, you may also reduce your labor costs. In addition,
IBM SmartCloud Enterprise provides you with highly standardized and
automated processes, which can help you improve the quality of your
projects by reducing development and deployment errors. Built to
support the security, reliability and control needs of large and midsized
enterprises and their partners, this flexible cloud infrastructure provides
a platform that can help you rethink your IT solutions and reinvent
your business.
IBM Global Technology Services
Data Sheet
Reinventing business with reduced
up-front investments and lead times
capacity to your immediate needs. In addition, the highly
automated IBM SmartCloud Enterprise provisioning process
also reduces the need for many traditional IT tasks, helping
you avoid the labor costs associated with the time-consuming
procurement of servers, storage and operating system software
and with installing, configuring and maintaining them. The
IBM SmartCloud Enterprise cost estimator can help you compare
cloud costs to the cost of a traditional implementation.
Without the need to invest in IT capacity up front and by only
paying for the capacity actually needed when it is needed, you
can gain the flexibility to explore a broader set of business
opportunities. This flexibility has propelled many of our
customers to new levels of business innovation and agility.
Although media companies and electronic game developers
were some of the first to leverage cloud economics, companies
from many other industries, including financial services, life
sciences, manufacturing, distribution and retail, have since
joined them. Examples range from global Internet collaboration
and media sharing to focusing massive cloud compute power on
performing genome mapping, financial analysis, stress testing
and distribution optimization.
IBM SmartCloud Enterprise provides a number of software
licensing options designed to help you reduce your overall
software costs. The cloud asset catalogs contain a selection
of ready-to-deploy software that you can use on a bring-yourown-license or pay-as-you-go basis. Pay-as-you-go software
with hourly rates can drive significant cost reductions if you
have short-term workloads or workloads with variable capacity
requirements. In addition, you can bring open source software
and software that you own or already have a license for to the
cloud by importing an image or installing it directly on cloud
virtual machines.
The automation and capacity in IBM SmartCloud Enterprise
can also help you achieve greater business agility by shortening
application development and deployment lead times.
IBM SmartCloud Enterprise can provide you with nearly
instant Internet access to virtual servers and storage that is
exclusively yours to use and customize as you like. You or your
partners can install applications and tools on top of the standard
images and operating systems, configure storage and adjust
security settings, just as you would in your own data center.
Once your configuration meets your requirements, you can
automatically deploy identical copies of it to developers and
production environments around the globe in minutes.
IT infrastructure can be taken out of the critical path on
your projects.
To realize these cost reductions, you need to select and redeploy appropriate workloads to the cloud. Intermittent or
short-term workloads and workloads with very dynamic capacity requirements, such as product launch workloads, are good
initial candidates because they can provide immediate benefits
and are difficult to handle without a cloud. Next, you should
identify workloads with moderate availability and security
requirements that fit well into a cloud context (for example,
the majority of development and test activities and many
production workloads with less sensitive data such as static
website applications). Studies show that over half of all
enterprise workloads fall into this category.
Helping you reduce costs with
automation and pay-as-you-go pricing
You can generate considerable savings in capital expenditures
for servers, storage and software and in their associated operational costs by using the cloud to more closely match server
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IBM Global Technology Services
Data Sheet
Enabling enterprises and their partners to
rethink IT solutions
Offering enterprise-class cloud security,
reliability and control
IBM SmartCloud Enterprise has been designed to be open and
f lexible to help enterprises extend their data centers into the
cloud as well as to allow their partners to leverage the cloud in
delivering their services. The following are a few examples of
the features that accomplish this:
When you are considering a new technology such as cloud,
there are always challenges and dependencies that need to be
addressed. Numerous studies have documented that enterprises
considering cloud computing are most concerned about security, reliability and control. IBM has carefully considered each
of these themes when building the IBM SmartCloud Enterprise
offering.
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Users have full (root) unique secured access to configure their
x86 servers and storage in the cloud.
Software bundles and images can be imported or created and
managed using tools and image catalogs.
The object storage Internet file system service can be set
up to create a global, private or public, enterprise web file
sharing system.
Virtual private networks, firewalls and filtering of network
traffic can be set up to match enterprise requirements.
The entire provisioning process can be customized using an
extensive set of application programming interfaces.
A cloud service framework within the cloud portal allows
users to define and manage their own platform-as-a-service
and software-as-a-service offerings.
IBM SmartCloud Enterprise is designed to be a security-rich
infrastructure. The design considerations have been guided by
the IBM Security Framework and IBM internal best practices.
They range from tight physical security of the cloud data centers to intrusion protection systems, access controls and constant vulnerability scanning of the infrastructure. In addition,
optional security features such as virtual private networking can
help you extend your existing security disciplines to the cloud.
Around-the-clock monitoring and management of the global
IBM SmartCloud infrastructure is focused on delivering at least
99.9 percent availability, as specified in the IBM SmartCloud
Enterprise service-level agreement. In addition, the cloud
environment provides a number of features that allow you to
deploy highly resilient configurations. These features include
‘anti-collocation,’ ‘virtual IP addressing,’ and image and storage
cloning for implementing failover strategies. These and other
features have motivated a number of enterprises to rethink their
disaster recovery strategies to now rely on the cloud.
IBM SmartCloud Enterprise does not include or mandate
IBM managed services that interact directly with a running
server instance. Enterprises can choose the IT management
processes and providers they prefer to satisfy requirements for
such things as application and image management, system monitoring, backup and recovery, and security management. They
may choose to provide these services themselves or to purchase
them separately from their partners or from IBM.
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Enterprise-class control of cloud users, processes and assets
is a differentiating feature of IBM SmartCloud Enterprise. This
control starts at cloud account creation time when an enterprise
account administrator is given sole access to the cloud portal
and the means to authorize other users to order cloud services
within defined limits. The built-in control panel continuously
provides a view of cloud assets and spending on servers, storage,
images and preconfigured service instances. Software asset
libraries, private and shared across the account, with tools provide a way to encourage and control reuse, standardization and
proper entitlement. Usage charge detail reports enable you to
allocate cloud costs to individual users and service instances.
You can manually control the automated cloud provisioning
engine or customize it to add or delete servers and storage on a
fixed schedule or in response to unpredictable or intermittent
loads, helping you to maintain service levels and control costs.
Why IBM?
Our offering includes features and functions specifically built to
meet the needs of large and midsized enterprise companies,
including reserved capacity pools, account administrator functions, VPN connectivity, around-the-clock premium support
and resilient configuration options. IBM SmartCloud
Enterprise is based on skills, experience and best practices
gained from years of managing and operating security-rich,
reliable data centers for enterprises worldwide. Our solution
uses proven IBM architectures, management tools and assets
hardened in numerous customer on-premises cloud engagements and IBM’s internal cloud implementations to help deliver
the quality, reliability and security-rich features your enterprise
requires. Finally, IBM can provide one of the broadest ranges
of cloud deployment options, from on premises to “on the
IBM cloud,” in support of a myriad of enterprise workloads.
© Copyright IBM Corporation 2012
IBM Global Services
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Somers, NY 10589 U.S.A.
Produced in the United States of America
May 2012
IBM, the IBM logo, ibm.com, and IBM SmartCloud are trademarks
or registered trademarks of International Business Machines Corporation
in the United States, other countries, or both. If these and other
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References in this publication to IBM products or services do not
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Please Recycle
For more information
To learn more about the IBM SmartCloud Enterprise, please
contact your IBM marketing representative or IBM Business
Partner, or visit the IBM SmartCloud Enterprise website where
you will find product details, a cost estimator tool, videos and
simulations, and the opportunity to sign up for an account:
ibm.com/smartcloud/solutions/enterprise
MSD03023-USEN-09