IBM White Paper Sample

Cloud computing is both a business delivery model and an infrastructure management methodology. The business delivery model provides a user experience by which hardware, software and network resources are optimally leveraged to provide innovative services over the Web, and servers are provisioned in accordance with the logical needs of the service using advanced, automated tools. The cloud then enables the service creators, program administrators and others to use these services via a Web-based interface that abstracts away the complexity of the underlying dynamic infrastructure.

The infrastructure management methodology enables IT organizations to manage large numbers of highly virtualized resources as a single large resource. It also allows IT organizations to massively increase their data center resources without significantly increasing the number of people traditionally required to maintain that increase. For organizations currently using traditional infrastructures, a cloud will enable users to consume IT resources in the data center in ways that were never available before. Companies that employ traditional data center management practices know that making IT resources available to an end user can be time-intensive. It involves many steps, such as procuring hardware; finding raised floor space and sufficient power and cooling; allocating administrators to install operating systems, middleware and software; provisioning the network; and securing the environment. Most companies find that this process can take upwards of two to three months. Those IT organizations that are re-provisioning existing hardware resources find that it still takes several weeks to accomplish. A cloud dramatically alleviates this problem by implementing automation, business workflows and resource abstraction that allows a user to browse a catalog of IT services, add them to a shopping cart and submit the order. After an administrator approves the order, the cloud does the rest. This process reduces the time required to make those resources available to the customer from months to minutes.

The cloud also provides a user interface that allows both the user and the IT administrator to easily manage the provisioned resources through the life cycle of the service request. After a user’s resources have been delivered by a cloud, the user can track the order, which typically consists of some number of servers and software, and view the health of those resources; add servers; change the installed software; remove servers; increase or decrease the allocated processing power, memory or storage; and even start, stop and restart servers. These are self-service functions that can be performed 24 hours a day and take only minutes to perform. By contrast, in a non-cloud environment, it could take hours or days for someone to have a server restarted or hardware or software configurations changed.