New products and services introduced at IBM Pulse in Las Vegas will give IBM's customers and partners even more to work with when it comes to deploying hybrid and private cloud environments, but Big Blue is also adding to its offering for Big Data in the cloud.

Chris Talbot

February 26, 2014

2 Min Read
Lance Crosby CEO of IBM SoftLayer
Lance Crosby, CEO of IBM SoftLayer

New products and services introduced at IBM Pulse in Las Vegas will give IBM‘s (IBM) customers and partners even more to work with when it comes to deploying hybrid and private cloud environments, but Big Blue is also adding to its offering for Big Data in the cloud.

Much of the announcement revolves around the latest development for SoftLayer, which was acquired almost a year ago and has since become sort of a backbone to IBM’s cloud initiatives. Within that aspect of the news, IBM has announced integration of IBM Power Systems into SoftLayer cloud infrastructure, which Big Blue noted will be a stepping stone to deliver “a level and breadth of services beyond what has traditionally been available for the cloud.”

Additionally, IBM made a few other cloud-related announcements at Pulse:

  • The first SoftLayer service built on Power Systems will be IBM Watson solutions, but other offerings around Big Data and analytics performance optimization are planned. This will include software-as-a-service (SaaS) and infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) offerings.

  • Big Blue launched IBM Platform Computing Cloud Service, which it described as a ready-to-run cluster in the cloud that also offers workload management. This falls into IBM’s hybrid cloud computing strategy, and the vendor seems hopeful it will help accelerate the adoption of hybrid cloud environments.

  • IBM Wave for z/VM was also introduced as a virtualization management tool for managing IBM z/VM and Linux virtual servers. IBM’s thinking with Wave for z/VM is to make it easier for customers to do first-time private cloud deployments.

“Once our development teams began testing Power Systems in the SoftLayer environment, Power’s competitive advantage immediately became clear,” said Lance Crosby, IBM SoftLayer CEO, in a prepared statement.  “The performance and efficiencies inherent in Power Systems are a real game-changer—particularly when it comes to building out modern, adaptable cloud environments that can handle the next level of Big Data coming our way.  The combination of SoftLayer and Power Systems will allow us to take cloud computing to a new level, providing customers with services they hadn’t thought were possible.”

As an example of a hybrid cloud deployment, IBM also talked up its work with entertainment and technology company Music Mastermind, which deployed a hybrid cloud solution based on IBM’s SoftLayer cloud service and iDataPlex systems technology. Music Mastermind’s flagship product is mobile game Zya; and IBM has recently been putting itself forward as a key provider of cloud for the gaming industry.

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