IBM Announces New SmartCloud Services, Partnership With Nirvanix

IBM has today expanded its cloud computing services for enterprise with the launch of new IBM SmartCloud services. These new offerings include SmartCloud Application Services, IBM’s new PaaS for enterprise, a portfolio of hardware and software called SmartCloud Foundation, and SmartCloud Ecosystem, which includes new services for IBM partners and ISVs.

The company plans to support around 200 million users by the end of 2012.

IBM says that it has ported SAP, ERP and all database applications to its SmartCloud platform. With its new services, it can now automate labor-intensive tasks associated with running SAP in the cloud, specifically SAP cloning, refreshes and patching. In some cases, IBM says the time savings can go from months or weeks to days or hours, depending on the task.

Also announced today is a new partnership with Nirvanix, a cloud storage company. Going forward, Nirvanix’s cloud storage technology will be integrated into IBM’s SmartCloud Enterprise storage services, allowing customers to upload files of any size, anywhere in the world, and access them from anywhere. The storage-as-a-service offering can support millions of users, billions of objects and exabytes of data.

Meanwhile, IBM’s new platform-as-a-service offering, SmartCloud Application Services (SCAS) will launch into beta this year (Q4), offering enterprise–grade security, open Java and cross-platform support with no vendor lock-in, and a comprehensive set of application infrastructure and managed services to enable development and deployment of applications to the cloud. It will run on IBM’s SmartCloud Enterprise and Enterprise+ – the enterprise-class infrastructure-as-a-platform specifically designed to run enterprise workloads at committed SLAs (service level agreements). IBM SmartCloud Enterprise+ is available in the U.S., and will be deployed worldwide by the end of 2012.

Lastly, the new SmartCloud Foundation family of private cloud solutions aims to help companies quickly design and deploy private cloud environments, and includes SmartCloud Entry, prepackaged private cloud software, plus SmartCloud provisioning and monitoring software.