How to Make a Baby Cloud with IBM SmartCloud Entry

Where are most organizations looking to start? Not with a wholesale shift to scary public cloud services and not with complicated over-arching rip-and-replace efforts. No, they're starting small with private clouds that may or may not ever make it into hybrid clouds. IBM Power Systems, it turns out, provides an easy foundation for starting small in a way that will let you grow big later.

We don't think there's any real "baby" cloud, but we hope you get the point: You can start small with the cloud by creating your own virtualized cloud environment on existing IBM Power Systems servers. While IBM just released a new "mini" PureApplication System model that brings cloud action to smaller organizations, you don't have to buy a cloud in a box to start building private clouds.

But there's an even better point here that tends to get lost in the shuffle around all the cloud hoopla: If you're going to leverage a cloud-focused infrastructure, how you start out is important. What will you use for your foundation?

To start thinking more critically about using the power of clouds for your business, here's three handy resources on POWER IT Pro that can help lay the groundwork and give you a peek into the basics -- and they all circle around the totally installable IBM SmartCloud Entry solution:

Seeding Clouds on Power Systems
This IBM-sponsored white paper (on POWERITPro.com) takes the time to point out why IBM Power Systems make a great foundation for building private cloud solutions -- hint, there's a lot of great reasons, starting with the awesome scalability of PowerVM. In addition, if you're having trouble with the justification of creating private cloud systems, this paper makes a great case for gradual cloud adoption built upon a rock-solid foundation.

IBM SmartCloud Entry Brings the Cloud to You
In this POWER IT Pro feature article by Greg Hintermeister, you'll get a closer look at how IBM SmartCloud Entry works -- and can work for you. Hintermeister notes, "With SmartCloud Entry, you can use access and resource controls to give users the ability to deploy the workloads they need. For example, testers could log on to SmartCloud Entry and see the five virtual appliances you've given them access to. They could then deploy new workload instances so that they can do their testing. Using built-in resource limits and metering, you can control how long the virtual appliances are available and how many cloud resources the testers can use. The end result is that you can allow a much broader set of users to deploy their own workloads into your Power System cloud and not have to worry that they're going to use it all up. By carving out a small percentage of the cloud for users, you can ensure that the majority of the cloud is reserved for production workloads."

IBM SmartCloud Entry 2.4
With this article, Hintermeister shows you why and how IBM SmartCloud Entry 2.4 can be put to use for you business, focusing more on how you can use it to manage multiple clouds from a single instance.