When IBM® SmartCloud® Enterprise was launched back in 2010, it was originally known as IBM Smart Business Development and Test on the IBM Cloud. The reason for this was that the market, at that time, was looking for solutions supporting development and test workloads. Once the market changed towards a demand for production workloads, the naming of the solution was changed to the current one.
In the following figure the history of IBM® SmartCloud® Enterprise is shown, depicting the timing and most important features of each release.
Further elaborating on this figure; the remainder of this appendix covers these major releases of IBM® SmartCloud® Enterprise (with availability date) in chronological order and elaborates on the main improvements relative to the previous version.
Note
Note the introduction of IBM® SmartCloud® Application Services (release 1.0) in the release of Version 2.2 of IBM® SmartCloud® Enterprise, which shows the tight integration and stacking of these public cloud services.
Release 1.0 (May 2010) has the following features:
Self-provisioning of images consisting of base images with either Red Hat Linux® or SUSE Linux operating systems
Additional IBM software images that can be configured as per your selection
Access to and use of software images in the catalog, charged either on an hourly rate basis or using current valid license entitlements obtained under a separate IBM agreement
Raw compute power with virtual machines, persistent storage, and static IP addresses
Monthly usage-based billing that supports enterprise purchase order procurement and invoices
Support consisting of self-service access to documentation and forums
Service level agreements based on service availability of 99.5% and 24 x 7 monitoring and management of the managing infrastructure
Release 1.1 (August 2010) has the following features:
Virtual machine instances from a selection of seven standard machine configurations consisting of CPU capacity, virtual memory, and storage
Additional persistent storage and static IP addresses provisioned on demand and VPN/VLAN network segmentation
Additional IBM software images loaded from a catalog during the provisioning process
Optional 24 x 7 premium-level telephone support
Release 1.2 (November 2010) has the following features:
Release 1.4 (March 2011) has the following features:
24 x 7 premium support with service level agreements and support for Group 1 Languages (English, French, Italian, Spanish, German, Portuguese, Japanese, Chinese-Mandarin, and Korean)
Anti-collocation support for instances, available through application programming interfaces (APIs) only, providing the ability to provision instances on separate nodes
Software bundles for private images allowing users to attach a bundle, with additional configuration or software installation, to a private image and save that image after the bundle has been attached
Release 2.0 (December 2011) has the following features:
Ability to provision instances with your own operating system and license
Ability to use third-party tools to custom-build software images, allowing users to import their own virtual machine images into the IBM Cloud or create an image from a public or private image catalog
Ability to move and copy images, allowing users to transfer images across IBM® SmartCloud® Enterprise cloud data centers
Ability to mount multiple persistent blocks of disk to an instance and enhanced storage location flexibility for users through self-service tools and capacity up to 10 TB
Utilization and billing enhancements for customer internal use charge back and feature enhancements to help reduce customer account management time
IBM® SmartCloud® Enterprise object storage capability via Nirvanix, Inc., a third-party storage solution provider, providing clients with a solution designed to support millions of users, billions of objects, and Exabytes of data
Release 2.1 (May 2012) has the following features:
New service level agreement (SLA) of 99.9% SmartCloud Enterprise gives clients confidence in factoring cloud-centric applications for a broad array of workloads
Two new Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating systems; Version 5.8 and Version 6.2
Upgrades to the persistent storage system, enabling increased speed and performance, and upgrades to embedded kernel-based virtual machine (KVM) hypervisors providing greater security and performance improvements
Release 2.2 (December 2012) has the following features:
Microsoft™ Windows™ Instance Capture—ability to create a true clone of an instance without the use of the Sysprep process
Windows Import Copy (initial release / limited availability)—ability to import a Microsoft image built outside of the IBM® SmartCloud®
Windows 2012 (initial release / limited availability)—support for Microsoft Windows Server 2012
APIs for guest messaging—provides a capability for customers to monitor the health of their SmartCloud Enterprise instances by issuing guest messages
Platinum M2—provides a new virtual machine with 16vCPU, 32 GB memory, and 2 TB storage to customers to meet their memory-intensive workloads
IBM® SmartCloud® Application Services release 1.0
Release 2.3 (May 2013) has the following features:
Windows™ Import/Copy allows users to import Windows Server virtual images from an existing environment into IBM® SmartCloud® Enterprise as well as transfer images between data centers
Announcing the availability of a year-round trial of both our infrastructure and platform as a service offerings, IBM® SmartCloud® Enterprise and IBM® SmartCloud® Application Services
SSAE 16 / ISAE 3402 Attestation, announcing the availability of the SOC 1 report (SSAE 16 / ISAE 3402) for the IBM® SmartCloud® Enterprise offering
IBM® SmartCloud® Application Services release 1.1