IBM Brings Integration, Management & Security to Hybrid Clouds 
As IT staffs get more familiar and skilled with SaaS, private cloud and virtualization, demand will grow for hybrid cloud solutions, according to growing research. With that in mind, IBM is set to ship this year a new offering to deploy, connect, manage and secure applications over a hybrid cloud that transverses on-premise, private and public clouds.
As IT staffs get more familiar and skilled with SaaS, private cloud and virtualization, demand will grow for hybrid cloud solutions, according to growing research. With that in mind, IBM is set to ship this year a new offering to deploy, connect, manage and secure applications over a hybrid cloud that transverses on-premise, private and public clouds.
IBM’s latest cloud-optimized SmartCloud offering brings together critical end-to-end cloud technologies from Tivoli, Cast Iron, WebSphere and other critical IBM technologies.
“Users already adopting cloud would like to go the next step and explore hybrid solutions across on-premise and public cloud where appropriate,” Dave Lindquist, CTO and VP of IBM Tivoli and IBM Fellow, told IDN. “Bringing integration and management together for end-to-end control we believe will prove critical to more and more efficient hybrid [cloud] adoption.
IBM’s hybrid cloud offering comes as Big Blue is receiving more requests from customers who are looking for better ways to move from dev/test cloud to provisioning to the cloud, Lindquist told IDN. Those requests in large part drove IBM to develop a solution that would help run dynamic workloads across private and public clouds, he added.
Dave Lindquist
CEO
CTO and Vice President, Tivoli & IBM Fellow
IBM
IBM’s hybrid cloud solution lets IT define policies, quotas, limits, and monitoring and performance rules for public clouds in just the same way IT does now using IBM Tivoli for on-premise systems, Lindquist said. Further, it simplifies security management by synchronizing on-premise and cloud application user directories.
The result: With the pre-integration of end-to-end cloud management, a design and deployment project that can embrace public and private cloud resources (including SaaS) that might have taken a month or more can now be done in a few days, Lindquist added.
IBM’s latest hybrid architecture will also provide IT a rich set of integration capabilities to increase granularity of management and monitoring of workloads end-to-end across hybrid clouds. In fact, IT will be given the capabilities to align workloads to business rules, data integration, application logic, policies and even security requirements, Lindquist added.
Key features of IBM’s latest SmartCloud for hybrid projects include:
- Control and Management Resources. To allow IT to define policies, quotas, limits, monitoring and performance rules for the public cloud in the same way as it does for on-premise resources. This approach will allow users to access public cloud resources through a single-service catalog – enabling IT staff to govern the access and the usage of this information in a simplified, efficient and secure way.
- Security. To provide better control of users’ access by synching the user directories of on-premise and cloud applications. The automated synchronization means users will be able to gain entry to the information they are authorized to access.
- Application Integration. Providing Cast Iron’s simplified “configuration, not coding” approach to application integration, the software combines the power of native connectivity with industry-leading applications to provide best practices for rapid and repeatable project success.
- Dynamic Provisioning. These monitoring, provisioning and integration capabilities allow its hybrid cloud to support “cloud bursting,” which is the dynamic relocation of workloads from private environments to public clouds during peak times. Such dynamic provisioning is controlled by IBM technical and business policies. The dynamic provisioning will also allow sysadmins to even re-allocate IT resources to handle workloads moving from private on-premise systems to public clouds during peak times.
Powering these capabilities will be a host of already-proven IBM technologies, including IBM’s Workload Deployer for private cloud and virtualization provisioning and operations, Cast Iron’s application and data integration capability, Lotus-driven directory synchronization, end-to-end management from Tivoli and even core repository technologies from IBM’s WebSphere Service Registry and Repository (WSRR).
IBM Sees Growing Use Cases for Enterprise Hybrid Clouds
Most early customers are looking for ways to extend monitoring capabilities to allow on-premise services to work with IaaS (infrastructure as a service) solutions, according to IBM’s Lindquist. “We’re seeing some common patterns for private cloud now being adopted for hybrid clouds, and we are embracing the Cast Iron model [of appliance and platform integration] to provide an easy way to configure monitoring and different security systems,” Lindquist said.
“Using Cast Iron’s architecture to integrate on-premise and off-premise monitoring makes it very simple to configure hybrid solutions,” he added. “The Cast Iron capability now becomes a conduit to an existing ITMS gateway, so we can extend on-premise resources to become available and manageable from IaaS.”
This kind of end-to-end flexibility also means that for those cases where IT doesn’t currently have ways to monitor its cloud-based workload (private or public), IBM can set up the ability to deploy monitoring capability directly into a customer’s infrastructure, Lindquist added.
According to cloud research project by North Bridge Venture Partners, GigaOM Pro and 451 Group, some 39% of cloud users report that the hybrid cloud is currently part of their strategy. That number is expected to grow to 61% in the near future, resulting in cloud users evolving to a hybrid strategy, the study added.
The SmartCloud option for hybrid clouds also sets up some compelling future capabilities for end-to-end enterprise clouds. One future use case Lindquist shared should prove compelling to many IT managers.
“Think about companies trying to run various workloads looking at the cloud, but they really need to control usage and have ready access to make updates or debug, as needed. These use cases also might require dynamic provisioning, support for business policy and governance,” Lindquist said. “This would present users a seamless end-to-end approach to private/public cloud, while at the same time letting IT place their resources where it makes the most sense and control them no matter where they are.”
Among beta users, the response to IBM’s hybrid cloud offering has been very encouraging, Lindquist said. Randy Berger, an IT manager at Siemens, said of the IBM solution: “As a user of IBM WebSphere Cast Iron, we have been able to … easily integrate our on-premise and cloud-based applications, [and] also provide live feeds of order data changes to our sales reps on any device … Expanding on the Cast Iron platform will help IBM provide even better access and management for hybrid clouds."
