IBM Smart Cloud Provisioning introduces PaaS capabilities with the possibility to create blueprints to standardize the deployment of complex tiered applications like for example a J2ee three tiers application made of a Http Server, an Application Server, and a DB Server, each running on a different VM eventually configured on different network segments. These blueprints are called patterns in IBM Workload Deployer terminology, which is the foundation technology of SmartCloud Provisioning. Virtual system patterns are used to define a... [More]

Tags:  cloud pattern virtual_image workload scp

People always ask about failures.  That's great that the cloud software can survive failures, but what about my user workloads?  Of course the simplest yet all too unsatisfying answer is that your application should be designed to tolerate failures and since the cloud is resilient you can always get more cloud resources.  Unfortunately, most people aren't satisfied with this answer.  Many enterprise IT folks are used to running expensive servers with very expensive fiber channel attached SAN storage.  But what happens with commodity storage... [More]

Tags:  redundant hslt resilience scp storage

This goes out to all the Operations guys and gals. Have you been tasked with getting your IT organization to be more efficient, more effective..."more with less?"  At the same time, your development teams are expected to delivery new applications at warp speed while you have specific service level agreements to meet governing the stability of your production environments.  Speed.... stability....  seems diametrically opposed?  If you haven’t heard of DevOps yet--the methodology of bringing development and operation teams together to... [More]

Tags:  smartcloud continuous devops delivery provisioning patterns

There will be a live session held Tuesday June 12 2012 that will provide an overview of the data protection capabilities that IBM Tivoli Storage Manager for Virtual Environments brings to IBM SmartCloud Provisioning.    Come to learn what we have to offer and tell us about your data protection strategies in the cloud and what use cases you have and see value in. This will be an opportunity to share and provide valuable feedback to the product teams that will shape future capabilities.   Date and Time: Tuesday June 12 2012 US: 6am PDT, 9am EDT... [More]

Tags:  protection scp data tsm

An interesting insight by Dr. Angel Diaz into the Practical Guide to Service Level Agreements ( SLA ), published by the Cloud Standards Customer Council ( CSCC ). Who is responsible for the management of the services that will operate in a cloud environment?  Who is responsible for identifying the elements of the agreement? What type of agreement should be in place? These are all questions that should be asked and understood before moving a service to the cloud. To read the complete article, go to... [More]

A new beta drop for IBM SmartCloud Provisioning is available. Here below you can see the list of key functionalities included: Live migration: move persistent images across compute nodes Evacuate deployed VMs running on a compute node through "pause migration" virtual machines take over: start managing images you have on the hypervisor even if they've not been created by SmartCloud Provisioning Group level administration: share images, networks, volumes, and elastic IPs among users belonging to the same group Deploy persistent... [More]

Tags:  cloud isaac smartcloud provisioning

Two new white papers are available on the IBM Integrated Service Management Library ( ISML ) that explain how to use Tivoli Storage Manager to back up different areas within IBM SmartCloud Provisioning. The first white paper provides information on how to use Tivoli Storage Manager Backup-Archive client to back up and restore the boot volume of an IBM SmartCloud Provisioning persistent virtual machine and how to make periodic back ups of a normal volume, and select and restore a particular backup. This white paper can be... [More]

Tags:  cloud solutions smartcloud_resilience vmware backup esx smartcloud kvm tsm integration provisioning

Service Health for IBM SmartCloud Provisioning has officially GA'ed and is now available on IBM Integrated Service Management Library ( ISML ). Service Health provides pre - built integrations between IBM SmartCloud Provisioning and IBM SmartCloud Monitoring utilizing a custom agent, OS agents, and the ITMfVE agents. A product provided navigator offers a concise overview on the health of the IBM SmartCloud Provisioning infrastructure enabling the ability to identify and react to issues in your environment quickly minimizing the impact, such as... [More]

Tags:  kvm vmware virtualization monitoring esxi health smartcloud_health solutions provisioning smartcloud cloud

  I really liked the post “ Rapid deployments with IBM SmartCloud Provisioning ” that explains how simple and fast it is to deploy instances using SmartCloud Provisioning. But after the instances are deployed the next question is: How can I "easily" monitor the performance and availability of the OS and applications of   launched instances? The solution is to integrate IBM SmartCloud Provisioning with IBM Tivoli Monitoring (ITM) so that all the running instances will be connected to the ITM Server and managed... [More]

Tags:  provisioning itm image icon icct isaac deployment smartcloud cloud