IBM Offers Freebie Slices on Shiny New SmartCloud

April 18, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Last week, IBM announced its first public cloud for running X64 applications, the Smart Business Cloud, or SmartCloud for short. The company also laid out its plans for fluffing up portions of the SmartCloud that would be based on Power Systems and support AIX or Linux applications and–eventually–IBM i workloads.

What Big Blue didn’t say as part of its announcements is that it had created a special promotion giving prospective customers slices of that cloud to play with for free.

In announcement letter 311-048, IBM launched the Smart Business Cloud Spring 2011 promotion, offering customers a piece of the X64 infrastructure cloud running either Windows or Linux gratis. IBM is giving away 32-bit instances of the SmartCloud slices in either the Copper or Silver configuration, which are the entry and midrange setups. (See last week’s story for the details on these configurations.) IBM is also tossing in a free 256 GB block of persistent storage that can be attached to the virtual server slice. IBM is using VMware‘s ESXi hypervisor to carve up the CloudBurst blade server setups that make up the physical iron underpinning the SmartCloud service.

IBM is offering the freebie X64 cloud slices out of its Toronto, Ontario, data center to customers who sign an agreement between April 8 and May 27; the capacity is available for use until June 10.

I wonder if IBM will be this generous with Power slices running IBM i. Somehow, I have my doubts, but I remain hopeful that Big Blue can cut OS/400 and i shops a little slack and let them play, too.