IBM Gives More Freebie Slices On SmartCloud Service
September 12, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
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Here’s the kind of deal you never see on a mainframe or a Power Systems-IBM i platform: free server capacity. And it is certainly not the kind of deal you see twice in the same year. But IBM is trotting out another deal to give customers a free spin on its SmartCloud infrastructure clouds, which support Windows and Linux workloads on X64-based iron. IBM puffed up the SmartCloud Enterprise infrastructure cloud back in April, its alternative to the EC2 compute cloud from online retailer Amazon, which is one of the pioneers in cloud computing. IBM wants to make its cloud a little more enterprise-grade in terms of security and other features and therefore charge a premium. Between September 2 and November 11, customers who sign a deal with Big Blue to run some apps on the SmartCloud Enterprise setups running in its data centers in Toronto, Raleigh, Boulder, Ehningen (Germany), Tokyo (Japan), or Singapore. IBM has five different configurations of 32-bit and 64-bit virtual machine slices, which are named copper, bronze, silver, gold, and platinum (you can see the details here). Each virtual server slice has a virtual processor running at 1.25 GHz, and the hypervisor on the cloud can have one to four virtual cores and an allocation of virtual memory and virtual disk. (The list price for the SmartCloud Enterprise service is here.) Under the SmartCloud Enterprise Fall 2011 promotion in announcement letter 311-129, customers are offered the choice of 64-bit copper or 32-bit silver VMs on the SmartCloud service. You can plunk on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, or Microsoft Windows Server 2003 or 2008. The virtual machines are given 256 gigabytes of application-accessible storage, and IBM is letting you bring your own software licenses (BYOL) or pay as you go (PAYG) as licensing options for systems and application software. There’s a slew of IBM software for content management, big data crunching, and application development that can be added to these VM’s, including:
If you take IBM up on the offer, you have to remember to delete your VM images once you are done or IBM will start sending you bills for the virtual capacity you have reserved on the SmartCloud. RELATED STORIES Big Blue Doesn’t Compete Against i Cloud Backup Vendors IBM Adds Disaster Recovery, Archiving to SmartClouds IBM Offers Freebie Slices on Shiny New SmartCloud IBM’s Power-Based SmartClouds on the Horizon Wanted: Cloud-i i-nfrastructure IBM Launches Power7-Based Cloudy Stacks Wanted: An AS/400-Centric System of Systems Microsoft Azure: An AS/400 for Private and Public Clouds Infor Signs On with Microsoft Azure Cloud Service, Unveils Infor24 IBM Buys Integration Appliance Maker Cast Iron Power Systems i Weather Report: Partly Cloudy Soon Upstart i Developer Brings AS/400s to the Cloud looksoftware Developing Cloud Connector for i OS IBM Creates a Cloud Computing Division The X Factor: Head in the Clouds
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