A look at the technologies that make up IBM Cloud Satellite Infrastructure Service

As Keith Dyer (VP, IBM Alliance, Cisco Global Partner Organization) explained in his recent blog, Cisco has worked with IBM to build an offering based on IBM Cloud Satellite -IBM Cloud Satellite Infrastructure Service (IS).

To recap: IBM Cloud Satellite allows clients to build and run applications in any public cloud, on-premises, or at the edge, and enables them to access secured and open cloud services at any point in their digital transformation journey.

Building on IBM Cloud Satellite and Private Cloud as a Service, Cisco and IBM worked together to develop IBM Cloud Satellite Infrastructure Service (IS) -an offering that gives clients the ability to access the benefits of Satellite from IBM on a fully managed private cloud infrastructure. IBM Cloud Satellite IS is delivered via an on-premises infrastructure run as-a-service and billed on a consumption basis. For companies that are working to modernize their applications and have workloads that need to stay in the datacenter, IBM Cloud Satellite IS delivers the benefits of public cloud with the security and performance of a dedicated, on-premises environment.

Satellite IS is designed to handle a variety of workloads, instead of creating infrastructure for one specific type of workload or use case. This approach can help speed clients' journeys to cloud -at a time when digital transformation is happening more quickly than ever.

While Keith explained why this solution will be useful to clients as they work to digitally transform, I'm going to delve into the technologies that power it.

Layering hardware, software, and services

Using a standardized architecture allows us to focus on outcomes for the customer. The underlying infrastructure is maintained by adhering to best practices learned and delivered over decades by IBM Services and Cisco.   Leveraging these best practices allows customers to remove the headaches of managing the infrastructure. The following diagram provides a high-level view of the solution components.

You can see the combination of Cisco UCS? B-Series and Fabric Interconnects with Cisco Intersight?.  When combined with the Storage-as-a-Service offering from IBM this creates the fully private cloud.  The UCS B-Series is optimized at the CPU and memory level to focus on delivering virtualized workloads. We leverage the flexibility of the UCS B-Series design to bring 40Gb based connectivity-with 100Gb on the way-to every compute node. The Cisco industry-leading SaaS management platform, Intersight, is core to the delivery and on-going management on monitoring. Cisco is expanding Intersight into a modular cloud operations platform, designed for hybrid environments.

The optimized infrastructure is only one aspect: In order to help customers adhere to best practices, the architecture management and program management offices provide on-going  governance. Management, orchestration, and automation are provided by IBM Managed Services leveraging Red Hat Ansible along with other technologies to deliver a seamless experience. The software components work with native APIs to bring the products together and provide a robust customer experience.

CloudForms Service Delivery

The IBM Services customer portal, powered by IBM Cloudforms, allows users to view real-time statistics or track status on updates.  Customers can order new infrastructure that is delivered dynamically.

We're shifting our customers' focus away from the infrastructure components to a solution that delivers an outcome by removing the worries of ongoing infrastructure management. By combining the strengths of market-leading organizations of Cisco, IBM, NetApp, and Intel, we are offering a solution that will help clients more effectively leverage their resources to speed up their digital transformation.

You can learn more by visiting the IBM Managed Private Cloud IaaS page.

Learn more about the Cisco and IBM partnership!

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