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IBM has beefed up its CloudBurst line of pre-integrated cloud service delivery platform in a bid to catch up with its chief rivals Oracle and HP, which have recently hit the ground running with all-in-one cloud computing offerings.
Big Blue on Thursday said it will deliver CloudBurst on its POWER7-based hardware and also offer it as software that can run on currently installed IBM and non-IBM systems.
The appliance and software stack are designed to automate service delivery within private clouds, IBM's CloudBurst appliances tie together hardware, storage, networking, virtualization and service management software that enable the building of private clouds, cutting gout the need to manually configure cloud computing systems. IBM estimated that CloudBurst can chop a solution provider's or IT staff's labor in integrating systems, provisioning and managing storage by up to 95 percent.
"Automating IT resources to support new applications is critical because at most companies, a business user typically must wait weeks to get access to new IT resources due to the manual processes required to set up resources," Lauren States, vice president of cloud computing for IBM's Software Group, said in a statement. Automating those processes, she said, can speed time to market.
IBM's CloudBurst updates come as the Armonk, NY, computing giant's chief competitors also hit the market with integrated cloud computing systems. At its OracleWorld event last month Oracle unveiled the Exalogic Elastic Cloud server, a systems designed to serve as a cloud computing platform that CEO Larry Ellison called a "cloud in a box." Other major players have prepped all-in-one packages to build private clouds with the goal of easing installation and management by integrating hardware and software. IBM's CloudBurst portfolio will also pit it squarely against HP's BladeSystem Matrix and CloudStart offerings and Dell's Virtual Integrated System.
NEXT: IBM Details New CloudBurst Hardware, Software
