While it comes about public cloud computing dealers, IBM does not always enjoy similar mindshare as Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services & Google Cloud Platform. But, a few analyst reports have actually claimed that actually IBM has the larger share of IaaS or infrastructure as service and PaaS or platform as service market than Google. Some other analyses place this solidly in the fourth place behind “big three.” Anyway, IBM is the biggest cloud computing providers in the world.
Telling story of the iSeries cloud computing abilities is a bit complicated by a fact that IBM makes use of diverse brand names for the cloud services. “IBM Cloud” tag is the umbrella category, which encompasses the hardware, software as well as services to help enterprises build clouds, and Bluemix cloud services. “Bluemix” name that is used was reserved for the IBM’s PaaS solutions for developers, however, now Bluemix provides a few IaaS services. Suppose all that were not confusing, over years IBM has actually used many different brand names for the cloud services, which includes Smart Business, Cloudburst, and SmartCloud.
IBM Private Cloud Services
As IBM is focusing more attention over Bluemix than SoftLayer, the list can cover the Bluemix offerings instead one available by SoftLayer. Company divides the Bluemix Services in 12 categories:
- Compute Services —That includes Open Whisk serverless computing, Cloud Foundry runtimes and containers
- Compute Infrastructure — It includes bare metal servers (a single-tenant servers, which are customizable), POWER servers (that is based on the IBM’s POWER architecture) GPU computing, virtual servers & server software
- Network — It includes load balancing, network appliances, Direct Link private connections, content delivery network & domain services
- Storage — It includes object, file storage and block, and server-backup abilities
- Watson — It includes IBM’s AI and ML services that it calls as “cognitive computing,” like Discovery search & content analytics, speech-to-text and Conversation natural language
- Mobile — It includes IBM’s Swift tools to create iOS apps, MobileFirst Starter deal to get the mobile app up & running, and Mobile Foundation application back-end services
- Internet of Things — It includes IoT platform & IoT starter packages from IBM
- Data & analytics — It includes data services, big data hosting, analytics services, MongoDB hosting, Cloudera hosting, and Riak hosting
- DevOps — It includes Eclipse IDE, constant delivery tools as well as availability monitoring
- Security — It includes tools to secure cloud environments, like firewall and hardware security modules (the physical devices with some key management abilities), The Intel Trusted Technology, SSL certificates and security software
- Integration — It includes tools to build virtual bridges for the hybrid cloud & multi-cloud environments, like API Connect & Secure Gateway
App services — It includes Message hub, Blockchain, and business rules, among many more
