The cloudburst of IBM

Was fortunate to attend another interesting cloud presentation by a consultant from UK (Mr Lewis Troke) on the cloud offerings by IBM. He was a captivating presenter, whom was very generous to share hs knowledge on cloud computing.At the end, the message that he wanted to put across was that Cloud computing is more business than IT. Technology and IT are still important, but to make cloud computing work, the business must champion it

For this post, I will like to narrow down on "cloudburst." the cloud enabler appliance from IBM.

Cloudburst is actually an IBM hardware appliance that integrates service management software with servers, storage and services for use in the private cloud. It is used to build, configure, deploy and manage the WebSphere private cloud environments. It is also used for building patterns and configuration, which are the Virtual images and script packages so that the deployment can be easier and automated, via the portal.

The virtual images are packaged in the WebSphere Application Server Hypervisor Edition(WAS-HE) under the Catalog. It contains WebSphere components, like the IBM HTTP server, and a Linux operating system. The (WAS-HE) is packaged according to the Open Virtualization Format (OVF) standard.

The steps involved in setting up a private cloud are firstly by integrating IBM cloudburst in the datacenter and network. Then assigning the local storage. Users account and security profiles are also created. The pattern creator can then create some pattern templates. After patterns are created and agreed upon, it will be saved and access list to it will be established. Likely the cloud administrator will then in future deploy this pattern as or when required.

To define the cloud, the administrator normally begin with hypervisors. The details of the hypervisor include the installed URL, authentication information, virtual machine instances and IP groups (DNS servers, gateways, and  range of IP addresses available for the cloud)

The cloudburst can also tracks and reports cloud usage for charge-back based on one's consumption. Other settings include security, backup/restore actions, firmware upgrades, logging, trace auditing and power management.

At the time of this post the cloudburst is at version 1.2.