Modeling, Deploying & Managing Applications on IBM Blue Box with Cloudsoft AMP

Editor's Notes

• #4: IBM is committed to accelerating the success of the OpenStack foundation, because interoperability in the cloud is critical for flexible cloud deployments and ultimately, client success. As a member of the OpenStack Board of Directors, our goal is to help progress the platform, sustain a vibrant ecosystem, and position OpenStack as the IaaS platform of choice for cloud consumers and providers. We're contributing resources to the continued improvement of code stability and quality while driving interoperability and investment protection through implementation of cloud standards such as the Linked Data and Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications (TOSCA).
• #6: When Blue Box first brought its products to market, we went and surveyed analysts, prospects and customers about what charasteristics they were seeking… From a public cloud perpsective, the answers were obvious Elasticity to get around procurement pain Opex billing models to have financial flexibility Ease of use of the service, both from a user interface and an API compatibility perspective And time to implementation – no one wanted to wait weeks or months to use their new service. From a private cloud perspective, customers asked for: Data Sovereignty to know exactly where customer resides Environmental control to have a single administrative overview of their environment Cost predictability so they can project their public cloud spend And hybrid capability to be able to integrate this cloud environment into their existing data sets. The Blue Box product suite helps make this all a reality.
• #7: So the question then becomes how do we do this in an effective way? We all know OpenStack is a challenge… you just have to read the headlines of the last 5 years to understand that fact. At Blue Box, we’ve brought similar approaches learned from operating public infrastructure at scale to the world of private cloud. I mentioned at the opening that Blue Box is a managed offering – we handle all of the pain of OpenStack, ensuring our customers get all the benefit. We use the exact same code base for dedicated and local environments, and they’re operated from our end identically. The only difference is the hardware play. In local, customers buy a prescribed set of hardware and operate in their data center of choice, dedicated, we operate the entire environment in any of SoftLayer’s global data centers. The key with all of this is that the experience is exactly the same for the customer – whether you’re using Dedicated or Local, you’ve got one consistent API and one consistent cloud platform. This opens a whole interesting realm of possibility for hybrid implementations.
• #8: So the question then becomes how do we do this in an effective way? We all know OpenStack is a challenge… you just have to read the headlines of the last 5 years to understand that fact. At Blue Box, we’ve brought similar approaches learned from operating public infrastructure at scale to the world of private cloud. I mentioned at the opening that Blue Box is a managed offering – we handle all of the pain of OpenStack, ensuring our customers get all the benefit. We use the exact same code base for dedicated and local environments, and they’re operated from our end identically. The only difference is the hardware play. In local, customers buy a prescribed set of hardware and operate in their data center of choice, dedicated, we operate the entire environment in any of SoftLayer’s global data centers. The key with all of this is that the experience is exactly the same for the customer – whether you’re using Dedicated or Local, you’ve got one consistent API and one consistent cloud platform. This opens a whole interesting realm of possibility for hybrid implementations.