IBM CloudBurst Hits the Mark

IBM rolled out a new infrastructure offering called CloudBurst last week. Aimed at development and test workloads, it is essentially a rack of x86 systems pre-integrated with VMware’s virtualization technology along with IBM software technology for provisioning, management, metering, and chargeback. I believe IBM, unlike Verizon, has hit the cloud computing mark with this new offering.

First, IBM is targeting the offering at a perfect application workload for cloud – development and test. The transient nature of development and test workloads means that an elastic computing infrastructure with built-in virtualization and chargeback will be attractive to IT staff currently struggling to be responsive to line of business application owners. The line of business application owners are holding the threat of Amazon EC2 over the head of the IT staff if they cannot get their act together with frictionless, elastic compute services for their applications. By responding with a development and test infrastructure that enables self-service, elasticity, and pay-as-you-go chargeback capability, the IT staff will take a step in the right direction to head off the Amazon threat. Moving these dev/test workloads to production with the same infrastructure will be a simple flick of the switch when the line of business owners who have become spoiled by CloudBurst for dev/test complain that the production infrastructure is not flexible, responsive, or cost competitive.

Second, IBM embraced virtualization to enable greater self-service, and elasticity. While they do not detail the use of VMware’s technology on their website (likely to preserve the ability to switch it out for KVM or Xen at some future date), IBM has clearly taken an architectural hint from Amazon by building virtualization into the CloudBurst platform. Virtualization allows the owners of the application to put the infrastructure to work quickly via virtual appliances, instead of slogging through the tedious process of configuring some standard template from IT (which is never right) to meet the needs of their application – paying for infrastructure charges while they fight through incompatibilities, dependency resolution, and policy exception bureaucracy. CloudBurst represents a key shift in the way IT will buy server hardware in the future. Instead of either a bare-metal unit or pre-loaded with a bloated general purpose OS (see the complaint about tedious configuration above), the systems will instead come pre-configured with virtualization and self-service deployment capability for the application owners - a cloud-computing infrastructure appliance if you will. Cisco has designs on the same type capability with their newly announced Unified Computing System.

Third, it appears that IBM is going to announce a companion service to the CloudBurst internal capability tomorrow. From the little information that is available today, I surmise that IBM is likely going to provide a capability through their Rational product to enable application owners to “federate” the deployment of their applications across local and remote CloudBurst infrastructure. With this federated capability across local (fixed capital behind the firewall) and remote sites (variable cost operating expense from infrastructure hosted by IBM), the IBM story on cloud will be nearly complete.

The only real negatives I saw in this announcement were that IBM did not include an option for an object storage array for storing and cataloging the virtual appliances, nor did they include any utilities for taking advantage of existing catalogs of virtual appliances from VMware and Amazon. While it probably hurt IBM’s teeth to include VMware in the offering, perhaps they could have gone just a bit further and included another EMC cloud technology for the object store. Atmos would be a perfect complement to this well considered IBM cloud offering. And including a simple utility for accessing/converting existing virtual appliances really would not be that difficult. Maybe we’ll see these shortcomings addressed in the next version. All negatives aside, I think IBM made a good first showing with CloudBurst.