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Introduction to IBM Cloud
Many organizations are moving their IT infrastructure onto cloud for better resiliency , scalability, reduced costs of operations , better security , enhanced speed to market , lower running costs of IT operations and so on. According to one survey in 2019, nearly 74% of the organizations are using cloud in some or other form. There are some major players in the cloud security market such as Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Alibaba , IBM cloud and so on.
In this article we will learn more about IBM cloud, how it operates, its advantages and disadvantages, and why to choose IBM cloud for your IT environment ?
History of IBM cloud
In 2013 IBM acquired SoftLayer, a public cloud platform which was founded in 2005 offering bare metal computing services as the basis of its IaaS offering. In the year 2016, October SoftLayer was rolled out as Bluemix brand of PaaS offering, giving users access to both IaaS and PaaS resources from a single console. In October 2017 the entire portfolio was rebranded as IBM cloud.
What is IBM Cloud ?
IBM cloud is a suite of cloud computing services which offers both platform as a service (PaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Software as a service (SaaS) . With IBM, IaaS cloud organizations can deploy virtualized IT resources such as computing power, storage and networking over the internet. There is a choice between virtual servers and bare metal servers.
In IBM PaaS cloud which is based on open-source cloud platform cloud foundry – developers can use services of IBM to create, manage , run and deploy different types of applications on public cloud , in house or local environments. It supports various programming languages such as Java, Node.js, PHP and Python and also extends support for other languages as well. IBM SmartCloud Solutions consist of a number of collaborations, analytics and marketing SaaS applications.
IBM cloud has a full stack of 170 products and cloud computing services for business to business (B2B) organizations around the world. IBM cloud services are positioned under three umbrellas namely SmartCloud foundation, SmartCloud services and SmartCloud solutions for improved productivity and efficiency.
Features of IBM cloud
- Widest range / array of databases options from No SQL to relational databases
- Powers AI intensive workloads which demand high data integrity, low latency and parallel processing
- Securing data movement on a network of networks by segregation of public, private, management traffic across separate network interfaces which help to manage compliance regulations
- Bare metal to virtual servers offers resources for any kind of workload
- Manages high performance and cost effective public, private and management networks
- Robust and durable object block and file storage services
- Natural language processing , visual recognition and machine learning leveraging
- Transactional trust with enterprise ready blockchain platform
- Migration of existing VMware workload to cloud with IBM and its partner services
- Virtualize IT resources not just storage but networking and computing power as well
- Implementation of strong security to the core
Services Offered by IBM Cloud
Services offered by IBM cloud are –
- Computing services
- Security
- IOT
- Integration
- Networking
- Databases
- Mobile management
- Migration services
- Storage capabilities
- Management of systems
- Analytics
- Virtualization
- Artificial intelligence and Machine learning
- Developer tools,
- Blockchain etc.
IBM Cloud Deployment Models
Public – provides access to virtual resources in a mult-tenancy model. An organization can choose to deploy its applications in one or more than one geographies
Dedicated – A single tenant service cloud IBM hosts in one of its data centres. An organization can connect to the environment using a direct network connection or VPN however IBM manages the platform.
Private – IBM platform that an organization deploys as a private cloud in its own data center behind a firewall.
Cloud Market Share
IBM Cloud Prerequisites
- Requires to have an IBM ID
- Knowledge of using a web dashboard
Dashboard of IBM cloud post login using IBM ID
How to create ID on IBM cloud
- Go to the URL https://cloud.ibm.com/login , and click Create an IBM Cloud account
- Enter your IBMid email address. If you don’t have an existing IBMid, an ID is created based on the email that you enter.
- Complete the remaining fields with your information, and click Create account.
- For account confirmation click the link provided in the confirmation email which is sent to email ID provided by you during registration process
What stands out IBM cloud?
- Number of bare metal servers deployed by IBM are highest and more customization and NVIDIA option for bare metal
- More management and monitoring capabilities
- Network services : integrated global private network, fastest DNS and CDN , unlimited network bandwidth for all servers
- 48k max IPOS for block with lower cost block and file for high I/O loads
- Flex deployment for unstructured data