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Dubai, UAE, October 13, 2011 – IBM (NYSE: IBM) IBM is unveiling a new portfolio of cloud solutions, allowing organizations to move beyond virtualization to quickly deploy and manage private clouds.

The SmartCloud Foundation portfolio contains a core set of private-cloud functions distilled from thousands of IBM client engagements and millions of cloud-based transactions IBM manages every day. The portfolio is designed to help both entry-level firms and more sophisticated clients quickly adopt private clouds from scratch or transform their current virtualized systems into highly efficient cloud infrastructures.

Demand for private clouds is expected to double as many organizations look for ways to gain greater flexibility from their computing resources while still maintaining control of their data. Forrester predicts the private cloud market to rise from $7.8 billion in 2011 to more than $15 billion in 2020.

North Carolina State University, for example, is using IBM private cloud software to offer better computational and educational services to students and faculty. Cloud computing is giving the university’s staff the ability to offer group or long-distance technical learning programs over the Internet within the university’s firewall.

“By using IBM private cloud solutions, N.C. State is offering services beyond what many other universities can provide with a traditional IT infrastructure,” said Dr. Mladen Vouk, professor and head of the Department of Computer Science at N.C. State University. “We’re better preparing our students for the jobs of tomorrow that integrate business with technology. The cloud enables us to give our students and faculty more resources in the classroom, teaching laboratories and at home.”

The SmartCloud Foundation portfolio contains these offerings:

• A new cloud ‘starter kit’ – IBM SmartCloud Entry is prepackaged, private-cloud software that provides simplified cloud administration, standardization of virtual machines and improved operations productivity with an easy-to-use, self-service interface. It is highly optimized for IBM Power and System x hardware.
• A new powerful provisioning engine and image management system – At the heart of cloud computing is the ability to dynamically create or “provision” virtual machines. Called IBM SmartCloud Provisioning, the software can create hundreds of virtual machines in less than a minutes and scale to more than 4,000 virtual machines in less than an hour. As virtual machines grow, image management becomes increasingly important to prevent image sprawl. IBM’s federated image library, image patching and analytics help organizations get control over the costs and complexity of virtual machines.
• New cloud-based monitoring software – IBM has applied its industry-leading (*) monitoring expertise to create cloud-specific software called IBM SmartCloud Monitoring. It provides greater visibility into the performance of virtual and physical environments: storage, network and server resources. The software contains business- and technical-policy analysis to enable better capacity planning and workload-placement. The software’s predictive and historical analytics help IT staff prevent outages of cloud services while reducing operational, licensing and capital costs.

“IBM has applied its decades of client experience with data centers to help clients take advantage of the private cloud opportunity quickly and easily.” said Scott Hebner, vice president, IBM Software Group. “We designed the SmartCloud Foundation to have the essential elements to build, and, importantly, manage private clouds with the greatest ease.”

These new SmartCloud Foundation technologies join IBM’s private cloud offerings such as:

• Workload-optimized appliances that are preintegrated with hardware, storage, networking, virtualization and service management software to create private clouds;
• Hybrid cloud solutions that link private and public cloud data in a secure way;
• A workload-deployer appliance that provides access to software virtual images and patterns critical to private clouds.

IBM is enabling Business Partners to take to market its portfolio of cloud solutions. IBM also provides training to its more than 130,000 partners and resellers, giving them the tools they need to customize IBM cloud solutions to meet specific client needs and requirements.

Footnote

(*) According to Gartner Magic Quadrant for Application Performance Management / Monitoring - http://www.gartner.com/reprints?id=1-17DU0AM&ct=110921&st=sb (link resides outside of ibm.com).

For more information on IBM, please visit www.ibm.com.

Press Contacts

Aly Rifaah
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Email: Rifaah@ae.ibm.com
Phone: +9714 4498301

Razan Karim
Spot On Public Relations
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