4 Basic Principles of Cloud Computing
Posted by Crystal Nichols on Fri, May 07, 2010 @ 08:36 AM
Cloud computing is one of the best ways to reduce your IT cost and complexity all while helping to optimize your workload and provide the highest possible availability to your user base. Cloud computing utilizes a dynamic infrastructure that is specifically designed to provide more services and capacity while using fewer server resources. One of the best ways to implement a cloud computing solution is with IBM Power Systems.
In fact, IBM Power Systems is in an ideal solution for cloud environments. There are a number of ways in which IBM Power Systems can be the foundation for your cloud, and a number of options to get you there.
The Right Kind of Workload Optimization
At the core of cloud computing is this idea of optimizing the workload. This allows you to make the most of your IT resources while increasing your overall flexibility. Power Systems use technology like IBM’s New Intelligent Threads to switch between processor threading dynamically. The Power Systems TurboCore mode lets you provide the most performance per core for things like database or transaction workloads. Active Memory expansion lets you expand your physical memory logically by as much as 100 percent for memory-intensive workloads like SAP.
Limitless Virtualization
With PowerVM, the virtualization component to IBM Power Systems, you can virtualize not just processor resources, but memory and I/O resources as well. You can use PowerVM to adjust capacity in a dynamic fashion, to move workloads between servers, and to maximize availability. This kind of virtualization even allows you to prevent planned downtime.
Automated Management
Being able to provision resources within the cloud is key to maximizing utilization and efficiency. It also helps to reduce your TCO and management costs. Utilizing IBM Systems Director Enterprise for Power Systems, you have a way to manage physical as well as virtual servers in an automated fashion. These tools are cross-platform, too. This means that, no matter what your environment, the Power Systems cloud can provision virtual machine images and effectively allocate resources, all while providing you with an accurate picture of how your systems are operating.
Solutions of All Kinds
No matter the shape, size or composition of your cloud, IBM Power Systems has a possible solution. Here are a few of the specific offerings:
• IBM CloudBurst. CloudBurst lets the data center quickly create and implement a private cloud environment. It’s a cloud computing quickstart aimed at a defined portion of the data center.
• IBM WebSphere CloudBurst Appliance. This offering lets you deploy and manage your SOA foundation in a cloud computing environment, and easily deploys WebSphere virtual images to your Power Systems partitions.
• IBM Smart Business Development and Test Cloud. This solution lets you create a private cloud environment for the purposes of development and testing, reducing your operating costs and your test cycle times.
Download the IBM Cloud Computing White Paper
In recent year
s, cloud computing environments have been gaining popularity.
To better understand the current rate of adoption, as well as drivers, barriers and considerations that are influencing the adoption of cloud computing, IBM conducted a survey in June and July of 2009 of 1,090 IT and line-of-business (LOB) decision makers around the world. Download the white paper to see the results! Click here for more information