IMPACT 2011: IBM Expands Cloud, WebSphere Offerings for Business Agility 
At this week’s Impact 20011, IBM officially rolled out major upgrades to its WebSphere and private cloud offerings to speed application deployment to cloud and virtualized environments.
At this week’s Impact 20011, IBM officially rolled out major upgrades to its WebSphere and private cloud offerings to speed application deployment to cloud and virtualized environments.
Taken as a whole, IBM launched some 60 products and updates aimed providing IT an array of smarter technologies to make it easier to provision, deploy, customize and update applications and SOA services to meet business needs, said Nancy Pearson, IBM’s vice president of marketing.
“IBM is bringing technologies designed to enable IT to let business better optimize for growth,” Pearson said during her keynote address at Impact. “So, with these announcements we’re driving business agility by offering enterprise [infrastructure] agility, operational dexterity and process integrity.”
One notable IBM product launch is Workload Deployer version 3.0, a hardware appliance specially designed to provide customers a private cloud environment to speed provisioning and improve operations and management. IBM Workload Deployer is built upon core architecture of the IBM Cloudburst Appliance, and includes IBM middleware virtual images, deployment templates based on IBM Best Practices and runtime management capabilities.
One key aim of Workload Deployer is to help companies now benefiting from cloud-based dev/test projects to more quickly move those to an operational private cloud / virtualization platform. “IBM Workload Deployer easily, quickly and repeatedly creates application environments that can be securely deployed and managed in a private cloud,” Marie Wieck IBM’s General Manager for WebSphere told IDN.
"IBM is bringing technologies designed to enable IT to let business better optimize for growth."
Nancy Pearson
Vice President
IIBM
In specific, users can customize IBM Hypervisor Edition images in IBM Workload Deployer for building and deploying highly customized IBM middleware environments. IBM’s approach to workload patterns brings abstraction to the level of the application and process – above the infrastructure level.
A set of Hypervisor Edition virtual images and workload patterns, including WebSphere Application Server Hypervisor Edition, DB2, and IBM Workload Deployer Pattern for Web Applications V1.0, are preloaded. Licenses to use these products must be purchased separately.
IBM’s Workload Deployer’s key features include:
- Capability to use multiple virtual images in a single pattern
- Enhanced deployment profile customization
- A secured shared environment with tamper-resistant vault for images and credentials
To manage applications in runtime IBM Workload Developer also brings workload-management and elastic runtime capabilities to production environments. The product also works with WebSphere Application Server Hypervisor Edition - Intelligent Management Pack, and integrates with development and service management tools from IBM Rational and Tivoli, allowing easy maintenance and upgrade cycles for runtime applications.
For quicker deployment, customers will be able to use a simple web-based interface to quickly install applications, configure databases and set up security for the cloud services they consume or deliver to customers.
IBM also shared some customer benefits from Workload Deployer. One IBM partner Alphinat used IBM Workload Deployer to offer its SmartGuide Designer solution to let customers create and to render complex Web applications -- without writing a single line of code. Another partner, Silvermoon Business Systems plans to deploy their LUNOS suite of insurance systems components onto the cloud to achieve 50 to 70 percent reduction in development and migration time.
Other notable announcements at IBM Impact include:
- WebSphere Virtual Enterprise, which provides the ability to consolidate servers and enhance the utilization of existing infrastructure.
- WebSphere DataPower XC10 Appliance, which improves response time and lowers risk of data loss via automatic replication for high-availability.
