IBM recently announced General Availability of IBM
SmartCloud Orchestrator (SCO). This is the newest addition to the SmartCloud
Foundation solution family of standards-based IT solutions for cloud-enabled
data center environments, including private, public or hybrid implementation
models. The family currently includes products that enable cloud environments
with functions that range from monitoring to management of security,
performance, storage, control desk, workload automation, and continuous
delivery operations. It also includes the complete family of PureApplication
and PureFlex systems.
Figure 1 - Cloud-based service creation |
We’ve heard and written about infrastructure orchestration
in the past. We endorsed these efforts at automating infrastructure management
as a very good thing. However, the vast majority of those orchestration
products address only a very limited part of the application and service
delivery process. In fact, as illustrated in Figure 1, they have been for the
most part limited to addressing the activities of virtual machine provisioning
(the part in the red box), not full cloud service provisioning.
IBM SmartCloud Orchestrator changes all that by automating
the orchestration of the full end-to-end cycle of provisioning and deployment
of a cloud-based service. This new product enables IT to build and implement
the fully-automated, dynamic, flexible, open orchestrated provisioning and
deployment of resources, workloads and services.
Over the last few years, we’ve watched and commented about
how IBM is building a complete architecture and basis for solutions that are
targeted at major problems of IT responsiveness to business demands for faster
service design, creation, development, testing, deployment, provisioning and
updating. The challenge was magnified by the necessity to be able to run on and
use an infrastructure that itself was under-going significant change and modification,
not the least being the heterogeneity of cloud environments.
To that end, IBM invested time and effort working with and
advancing a range of open-standards groups and organizations (TOSCA- platform
services, OpenStack – for infrastructure service and OSLC – for governance
services) to provide the necessary critical foundation for integrated management
in heterogeneous operating environments. SCO with demonstrated interoperability of open
cloud services is a testament to the benefits of and justification for those
efforts.
The Final Word
We’ve seen multiple demonstrations of IBM’s SmartCloud Orchestrator.
It comes with and has access to a variety of for fee and free workload patterns
built for IBM’s PureApplication system. Patterns are usable as is or can be
customized, even re-built to uniquely fit your environment. All are reusable
and can be combined and extended with pre-built images, process/configuration
automation patterns that are available through the Cloud Marketplace.
Standardized service development and delivery makes administration and support,
as well as development and deployment more efficient, which also lowers cost.
SCO yields benefits across the organization. It speeds the
design and deployment of new services and applications, reducing IT costs as it
improves efficiency. End-to-end exposure and detailed views of IT processes facilitates
and simplifies a process of auditing and updating to eliminate inefficiencies
and improve overall performance.
For the business staff, the result is a reduction in the time-to-market
and speeds the development of new services needed by the business staff to
respond to and keep up with competition. The relationship between IT and
business improves as IT effectiveness and efficiency in responding to business
requests for service visibly improves.
IBM SmartCloud Orchestrator combines with the rest of the SmartCloud
Foundation to automate and ease the effort required to keep track of the cost
of cloud services, monitor and manage their health, as well as monitoring and
managing infrastructure provisioning and the capacity used and needed by cloud
resources. It sounds like an all-around win for IT and business to us.
Great Article
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