Book Image

IBM SmartCloud Essentials

By : Edwin Schouten
Book Image

IBM SmartCloud Essentials

By: Edwin Schouten

Overview of this book

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.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)

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...