In common with many large businesses and major IT suppliers IBM is showing increasing interest in exploiting the exciting opportunities offered by the hybrid cloud.
The hybrid cloud is a cloud computing environment that employs both private and public clo
ud services. It is becoming strategically important to many organisations as they realise they need many different types of cloud services in order to meet a variety of customer needs.
IBM has made a number of important recent announcements in this area, including:
- An expansion of its Power server portfolio including the Power System E850, a four-socket Power8 server targeted at cloud service providers and enterprise customers, and PurePower, an engineered system designed to offer a converged infrastructure platform for big data, social, mobile and analytics workloads.
- XIV GEN 3, a system that uses IBM’s storage compression software to store more data without additional hardware
- Spectrum Control Storage Insights, a storage management cloud service that uses analytics to simplify capacity planning and improve storage use by reclaiming underused storage and optimising data placement
Don Boulia, IBM’s vice president of cloud services put these new developments into context when he said “Hybrid cloud computing requires new levels of openness, dynamic data management, integration, automation and scalable performance in server, storage and software technologies.”
And the inexorable move towards the hybrid cloud has been further reinforced with the news that new capabilities are being rolled-out for IBM Watson that will help clients to bridge enterprise data with web-based cloud applications for faster and more insightful data intelligence.
The intention is to bring together the cognitive computing and content analytics capabilities from Watson with a growing list of services found in the Watson Zone on Bluemix, IBM’s cloud innovation platform. This will help to address a common stumbling block for cognitive computing application development with developers often unable to move all of their data into a public cloud for reasons such as the size of the data sets or regulatory, privacy and security limitations.
With the new Watson Hybrid Cloud, developers can utilise the Watson Explorer tool, which provides a single view offering visibility into combined content and data from disparate systems throughout an enterprise. As a result, users will be able to use the combined strength of analytics and cognitive capabilities in on-premises and public cloud capacity by tapping developer tools and services available on IBM Cloud, enabling them to start building their own hybrid Watson applications.
Mike Rhodin, senior vice president, IBM Watson explained: “What we see today is that the cloud is transforming into a hybrid data delivery model, so naturally developers seek flexibility to run apps and services across on-premises systems and the cloud; thereby making it much easier to deliver Watson to the enterprise.”
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