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IBM SmartCloud Essentials
IBM SmartCloud Essentials

IBM SmartCloud Essentials: This book provides an overview of what modern cloud computing involves, and then focuses specifically on the most important features of the IBM SmartCloud portfolio. A crash course in implementing cloud computing for your organization.

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IBM SmartCloud Essentials

Chapter 2. IBM® SmartCloud® Enterprise

As we have seen in the previous chapter, IBM® has a wide variety of cloud computing solutions in the market. From this chapter on, this book will cover IBM® SmartCloud® Enterprise, one of IBM's public IaaS solutions. The information in the following chapters is based on the current version of IBM® SmartCloud® Enterprise (at time of writing this book, it is version 2.3).

Although a lot of information is available about IBM® SmartCloud® Enterprise's capabilities, it's not always easy to find. This book will provide you with an overview of those capabilities, and how to use and configure IBM® SmartCloud® Enterprise to fit your business needs.

In this chapter, we will start to understand the basic concepts and learn about the basic and premium services available. We will learn how to work with the basic functions by navigating to the self-service portal called SCE management console and how to quickly get a cost estimate for any specific configuration. Lastly...

Introduction


In the previous chapter, we have already touched upon IBM® SmartCloud® Enterprise briefly as one of the two (publicly) managed IaaS solutions available.

To recap, IBM® SmartCloud® Enterprise is a flexible computing IaaS solution designed to provide clients with rapid access to enterprise class cloud environments. The service provides us with a SCE management console, extensive image catalog containing IBM and non-IBM software products, and the ability to upload our own images, while allowing the user full control over all the resources provisioned above the managed hypervisor.

IBM® SmartCloud® Enterprise has been available since May 2010, matching the needs of the market at that time by primarily focusing on test and development workloads. One year later, in May 2011, the service offered full support to production workloads as well.

To improve the support for production workloads, IBM® SmartCloud® Enterprise officially achieved certification of the ISO/IEC 27001:2005 standard in...

Basic services


This section covers the basic services, which are fundamental to the cloud solution. We will cover the most essential information. A full description of all the basic and premium services can be found in the service description webpage at www-935.ibm.com/services/us/en/cloud-enterprise/contracts/services_description.html.

Before we start elaborating the basic services one by one in the following sections, let's look at what a standard cloud server consists of. A standard server configuration will normally consist of a virtual machine instance, virtual local storage, and a network access method to connect to it. Let's look at each of these components, along with the images in the images catalog and support options.

Virtual machine instances

A virtual machine instance consists of one or more virtual CPUs, virtual memory, and virtual local storage. In IBM® SmartCloud® Enterprise, we have a choice of 10 virtual machine instance sizes and 10 different CPU-RAM combinations (32- or...

Premium services


Now that we have discovered what the basic services are, let's see how these can be extended to allow more advanced configurations. There are three types of premium services available: network access, storage, and support options.

Storage options

It is quite obvious that the amount of storage provided with the virtual machine instance is not sufficient for our needs. We have the option to append the virtual machine instances with additional storage, which will remain until it is manually deleted, using block storage.

Block storage

Block storage, also called persistent storage, is ideal for applications with higher I/O requirements such as database files. Block storage is available in eight unit sizes: 60 GB, 256 GB, 512 GB, 1 TB, 2 TB, 4 TB, 8 TB, and 10 TB.

The usage charge is based on the number of gigabytes (GBs) ordered in each persistent storage block, independent of the actual used GBs, and the number of storage I/O access requests.

Interestingly, the images in the private...

Estimating your cost


One of the characteristics of cloud computing is pay-for-use, which requires full transparency of the price of each of the elements multiplied by the times we used the elements. Now that we have covered all the basic and premium services, let's look at the charges associated with these services.

As mentioned previously, there is a charges schedule available online for this. But we can also use the Monthly Cost Estimator which allows us to quickly estimate the cost of any configuration that you build with IBM® SmartCloud® Enterprise. The first step of the 5-step process is shown in the following screenshot:

The Monthly Cost Estimator allows you to fill in the service configuration you need along with your estimate at the time of using the services. In the five steps, you will need to fill in the following details:

  • The image(s) you will use to provision your instances from

  • The virtual machine instance size(s) your image(s) require(s)

  • Additional block or object storage, if...

Preparing to get started


Now that we understand the technical and financial details of IBM® SmartCloud® Enterprise, we can order access to the service online and/or order additional services to expand what we are already using.

Creating an account

If you have not done so already, IBM® SmartCloud® Enterprise can be easily ordered online at www.ibm.com/buycloud. The online order form is an easy 7-step process that takes us through all the basic and premium services you want to order, quite similar to the Monthly Cost Estimator:

  1. Choose a plan to order. Select either Unreserved virtual machine instances or Reserved capacity packages with preferred pricing, as differentiated in the section Virtual machine instance, and click on Continue.

  2. Select the premium services you need, such as Object storage, VPN, and Additional support, and click on Continue.

  3. Then, you need to sign in with your IBM ID, which will be used as the user credentials to sign in to the IBM® SmartCloud® Enterprise management console...

Navigating to the SCE management console


Once the account has been enabled, you can log on to the IBM® SmartCloud® Enterprise management console from where you have control over the basic services and most of the premium services that you have ordered. See the following screenshot which depicts the Support page of the SCE management console:

The SCE management console is the access point of the services, available via www.ibm.com/cloud/enterprise. From the management console, you are able to control all the basic services, get a list of your active instances, retrieve user statistics, find video demos and other useful resources.

Note

An alternative way to control your services is to use the IBM® SmartCloud® Enterprise API, which we will cover in details in the next chapter.

The SCE management console contains four pages as depicted in the previous screenshot: Control panel, Overview, Account, and Support. Let's look at each page individually:

  • The Overview page shows a summary of our account and...

Summary


In this chapter, we have learned the basic IBM® SmartCloud® Enterprise resources model and the basic and premium services available. We have also covered where to find the most relevant documents, contracts, and all the prices right from the Internet. Finding out what your intended workload will cost beforehand is very valuable, so we have also covered how to use the Monthly Cost Estimator.

Lastly, we have covered how to navigate to the SCE management console and where to find the most basic functions. In the next chapters, we will cover more detailed functions and features of the services.

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Key benefits

  • Understand the basic concepts of cloud computing and learn about common cloud standards
  • Learn about the IBM SmartCloud portfolio with its many facets
  • Full of clearly explained concepts, step-by-step instructions and hands-on exercises

Description

IBM, the oldest technology company in the world, has a wide variety of powerful cloud services to offer from its IBM SmartCloud portfolio. Being able to differentiate them, and knowing how to use them efficiently gives you a competitive advantage over others. Starting with the basics of cloud computing, this guide covers the wide range of cloud components, services, and solutions in the IBM SmartCloud portfolio. Following on from this, you'll be introduced to the public , Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud service - IBM SmartCloud Enterprise; before peeking into the future of IBM cloud services. Using this book, you will discover the advantage of both traditional enterprise computing and public cloud computing. You will explore IBM's portfolio of cloud computing solutions ranging from infrastructure services (IaaS), to business services (BPaaS), and private to public cloud. You will be taken through a number of in-depth use-cases, examples, and hand-on exercises that will help you to take advantage of infrastructure as a service solution IBM SmartCloud Enterprise quickly and easily. You will learn everything you need to know about the IBM SmartCloud Enterprise, including how to take advantage of cloud computing within your organization.

Who is this book for?

This book is great for anyone who wants to get a grasp of what cloud computing is and what IBM SmartCloud has to offer. If you are an IT specialist, IT architect, system administrator, or a developer who wants to thoroughly understand the cloud computing resource model, this book is ideal for you. No prior knowledge of cloud computing is expected.

What you will learn

  • Navigate the IBM SmartCloud portfolio, which contains a wide variety of cloud computing services
  • Explore the advantages of cloud computing, and the most important cloud standardization bodies
  • Create virtual servers and virtual storage
  • Create images, and perform basic functions using the self-service management console
  • Set up virtually any application topology.
  • Perform a cost estimate for your cloud system within minutes
  • Establish object storage to store terabytes of files and other important data in a highly secure way
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Publication date : Dec 20, 2013
Length: 112 pages
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Language : English
ISBN-13 : 9781782170648
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Table of Contents

6 Chapters
IBM SmartCloud Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
IBM SmartCloud Enterprise Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Getting Started Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Advanced Use-cases Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
There's an Ecosystem for That Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Further Developments Chevron down icon Chevron up icon

Customer reviews

Rating distribution
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Half star icon Empty star icon 3.5
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Maarten Boerma Feb 05, 2014
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon 5
IBM SmartCloud Essentials gives the reader a very thorough and clear view of IBM’s Cloud services. The term Cloud computing has been hyped for many years, this book shows the way genuine cloud services should be structured and implemented. Although IBM has changed some of the services described in the book it is still very valuable. Questions addressed are for example: What do you need to look for when considering a Cloud service? What are your functional needs? What do I need to do myself? What is provided as part of the service? etc.The author Edwin Schouten writes clearly and it is easy to read. This seems trivial, but with this type of technical content, it is not.Highly recommended for anyone interested in the way Cloud services are structured and more specifically for people looking at or working with IBM’s Cloud services.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
Paul M Lichstein Aug 03, 2014
Full star icon Full star icon Empty star icon Empty star icon Empty star icon 2
Really not about how to use the off the shelf smartcloud product but about how to integrate your custom applications with the smart cloud. For programmers and IT staff. Not usful for a small business looking to implement the off the shelf version of the product.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
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