With the barrage of cloud news constantly hitting the market, it can be challenging for organizations to differentiate between all of the solutions and capabilities out there.

 

But with the latest cloud offering from IBM, the value proposition is quite simple—you get a low-cost, low-risk entry to cloud computing with compelling features. This is especially important for organizations who are still trying to leverage the cost savings of virtualization.

 

Our customers have told us they’re looking to cloud computing to increase agility—the ability of IT to evolve and meet business needs—and they’re looking for ways to control expenses related to IT investments. They also want to reduce IT complexity while at the same time increase utilization, reliability and scalability of IT resources. And they are looking for the ability to expand capabilities gradually, as their needs change and grow.

 

In designing a solution to meet all of these needs, we developed IBM SmartCloud Provisioning. Using industry best practices for cloud deployment and management, this new solution allows organizations to quickly deploy cloud resources with automated provisioning, parallel scalability and integrated fault tolerance to increase operational efficiency and respond to user needs.

 

The name doesn’t tell the whole story though. IBM SmartCloud Provisioning is a full-featured solution wrapped up in an easy-to-implement package. That means you get:

·         Rapidly scalable deployment designed to meet business growth

·         Reliable, non-stop cloud capable of automatically tolerating and recovering from software and hardware failures

·         Reduced complexity through ease of use and improve time to value

·         Reduced IT labor resources with self-service requesting and highly automated operations

·         Control over image sprawl and reduced business risk through rich analytics, image versioning and federated image library features

 

Using this technology, we’ve seen customers get a cloud up and running in just hours—realizing immediate time to value. It’s fast—administrators have been able to go from bare metal to ready-for-work in under five minutes, or start a single VM and load OS in under 10 seconds, or scale up to 50,000 VMs in an hour (50 nodes).

But ultimately, these IT benefits have translated to business benefits—customers have been able to see how cloud computing can impact their business, and how they can accelerate the delivery of new services to drive revenue.

With the new release of IBM SmartCloud Provisioning this week, you can try and see firsthand  the potential of this breakthrough technology to accelerate your journey to cloud.

And if you want a preview of what’s in development, you can join our Open Beta program for access to beta-level code.

 

Tags:  provisioning automation virtualization cloud-computing cloud computing