IBM picks Aus for enterprise cloud node
IBM will implement a SmartCloud Enterprise+ point of deployment in Australia in the fourth quarter of this year, providing companies with access to a local, multi-tenanted cloud for production workloads.
Dean Evans
(Credit: IBM)
In April 2011, IBM launched its SmartCloud Enterprise and SmartCloud Enterprise+ products. The former group of products provides a public cloud platform for companies to use for development and testing, while the latter is a managed platform for production environments, with a 99.9 per cent uptime service-level agreement (SLA). While SmartCloud supports Windows and Linux Servers, SmartCloud Enterprise+ will also allow AIX instances. A service catalogue provides multiple software images for the client to use in their cloud, and they can also bring their own software into the service.
This will be the first SmartCloud infrastructure deployment in Australia. The company has decided to install a point of deployment (POD) for SmartCloud Enterprise+ in Sydney, according to IBM Global Technology Services cloud computing executive Dean Evans. Australia will be the seventh location globally to get a SmartCloud Enterprise+ POD, and the first country in the Asia-Pacific region; Australia was reportedly chosen for the maturity of the country's outsourcing and managed service market.
The POD will consist of 1500 virtual machines and associated storage. It is currently under construction, and the aim is to have the first set of customers brought online by the end of October. In addition to the usual service catalogue of IBM software that will launch with the service, SAP managed application services will be available in 2013, Evans said.
The services are aimed at customers needing to adhere to regulations on data sovereignty, or those that are particularly sensitive to latency for application use, according to Evans. Customers with multi-national operations can also move workloads between points of deployment as required.
Customers can ramp use of the service up or down as they need via a self-service portal. Although changes would normally take effect within 10 to 15 minutes on SmartCloud Enterprise, because SmartCloud Enterprise+ provides managed services such as middleware environment-management and operating system patches, it may take 24 to 72 hours to provision a server on SmartCloud Enterprise+, Evans said. Payment for the service is based on usage.
There are approximately 20 clients who would be signing up for the service in the Australian POD when it goes live in October, according to Evans, which would occupy around three quarters of the 1500 virtual machine capacity. Normally, points of deployment go live with 3000 virtual machines, but the current economic environment has made the company cautious.
"We wanted to take a more conservative start," he said.
The pricing of the service will be the same as that already charged globally, adjusted for local currency rates, according to Evans.
Australia gets popular
Earlier this month, Amazon also announced that it has added an edge location in Sydney for Amazon CloudFront and Amazon Route 53.
The decision to launch the edge node was based on customer requests, internal logging and responses to a survey.
"We believe that this location will prove to be of great benefit to our customers, providing them with increased performance and reduced latency," Amazon said in a statement.