Give existing applications cloud-native flexibility

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The cloud has already had its praises sung widely: it boasts lower costs, high availability, good disaster recovery, and no hardware concerns. But quickly embracing a completely cloud-native infrastructure and application environment is no walk in the park. VMware users can now port existing applications, storage, and networks to a multi-tenant shared environment—within the IBM Cloud.  

With IBM Cloud for VMware, companies and their CIOs have had the possibility to move their virtualized IT landscape into the cloud for a while now. Until recently, this option was based on physical “hosts”, which can be upscaled at the cluster level, just like in the company’s own data centre. This single-tenant setup provides the client with complete control, based on root access all the way down to the virtualization layer level.

Managed variant 

The recently introduced IBM Cloud for VMware Solutions Shared (IC4V Shared) adds a managed variant into the mix. The infrastructure is managed by IBM up to the hypervisor—that includes patches, upgrades, and monitoring, with a familiar look and feel. Customers can access their existing VMware related resources, competences, and tools. VMware functionality, but in a public cloud environment. Scalable on the fly for each virtual machine.

Thanks to VMware vCloud Director, this extremely low-threshold multi-tenant environment lets users expand existing environments to a virtual cloud data centre, at a low start-up cost. Again: you can scale up per virtual machine, just like in the native cloud. This offers companies exceptional capacity, flexibility, and scalability for groups or even for individual applications they cannot (or do not want to) immediately rewrite into cloud-native apps.

IBM is the only company to provide this service in an environment that’s scalable worldwide. The service is currently available at data centres in Dallas (USA) and in Frankfurt (Germany).

IC4V Shared was designed to provide cost-effective self-service access to the cloud, within minutes. Regardless of whether it’s about the development and testing environment, back-ups, disaster recovery (even by way of a virtual machine that can be activated in case of problems), or a complete cloud transformation. Applications can be replicated one-to-one to the IBM Cloud, with no further virtual machine configuration required.

Distinctive 

Companies can now choose between “control and single-tenancy”, which is crucial in sectors like financial services, and the more quickly scalable variant in a multi-tenant solution. This way, a wide variety of applications within less strictly regulated industries and organizations can profit from the low cost and considerable ease of use. Thanks to IC4V Shared, those companies can increase their focus on innovation and distinctive capabilities.

Both of the environments described can also be linked, ensuring that organisations and their IT departments can achieve the optimum balance between Dedicated and Shared – all depending on their needs regarding control, compliance, flexibility, etc.

Two variants 

IBM Cloud VMware Solutions Shared (IC4V Shared) comes in two variants: On Demand and Reserved. For the former, you pay an hourly rate for the computing power you actually use. The latter allows clients to “reserve” capacity for a certain period of time to use when they need it, such as for disaster recovery or during large-scale projects.

Cloud capacity is not infinite, after all. A limited number of virtual machines is not a problem availability-wise but transferring 1,000 or even 8,000 physical servers “on demand” in a disaster recovery scenario is definitely a challenge. By reserving, clients can cover their bases.

By the way, things like storage and network traffic are always invoiced based on actual usage, further increasing the potential savings for dynamic workloads.

In sum, IBM Cloud VMware Solutions Shared offers all the advantages of current cloud dynamics without the effort and investment involved in far-reaching application modernization.

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