Tony Higham and Paul Kelsey spoke about deploying IBM Digital Experience on both an on-premise and public cloud. There are 5 properties of the cloud generally recognized in the market. IBM is fully supporting each of theses properties:
- On-demand & Self Service – its there when you need it
- Broad Network Access – a global network with fast access from any device
- Resource Pooling – customers share computing resources at some level. IBM is not really embracing shared hardware. They are really into private instances on bare metal.
- Rapid Elasticity – you get what you need
- Measured Service – pay for what you get
IBM is going after the cloud using the following concepts because the cloud presents real business value:
- Months to Minutes
- Heroics to the Easy Button
- Automate Everything
Digital Experience on the cloud creates the entire infrastructure so you don’t have to separately install and configure each type of software you need in the application.
Here is how IBM Digital Experience works on the cloud. It really is the IBM PureApplication story. IBM has built PureApp to provision application patterns quickly and efficiently. You may have heard about the WebSphere Portal Pattern on PureApp. In the recent past PureApp was an on-premise box. Now IBM has implemented PureApp Services on their SoftLayer cloud. As a result, you can use the Digital Experience Pattern right on the SoftLayer cloud and have an instant cloud-based system.
In a non Pure App infrastructure, it typically takes several engineers and two weeks to install a WebSphere Portal cluster with a database and security in a production environment. What is the impact of PureApp on the portal? This same environment can be installed in 45 minutes either on premise or in the cloud. Paul demonstrated creating a clustered environment on PureApp. Everything needed for a production environment is setup, configured and tuned.
With the new PureApplication Service on SoftLayer, you can run your entire WebSphere Portal cluster and take advantage of all the PureApplication capabilities on-prem. PureApp on Softlayer is a pay as you go service in increments of three months. You can also incrementally add cpus and memory to nodes you have installed on SoftLayer.
Another interesting feature is the ability to move your Portal environment from on-prem to SoftLayer or from SoftLayer to on-prem depending on your needs.
