IBM Includes Windows In Its Test Cloud

If enterprises are going to be building their own service-oriented IT systems for private cloud-type deployments, they need to have a supportive development environment with the right tools and plenty of bandwidth to do accurate tests and quality assurance.

Enter IBM, which is in the process of expanding its cloud development services to do just that. The company said it is retooling its Smart Business Development and Test package on the IBM Cloud to add support for Windows, and other enhancements, to serve teams of software developers better.

IBM also introduced an integrated development and test environment to go with its latest software and services designed to enable developers to improve quality of their work and shorten development times across the application life cycle.

Improved Test Environment

The IBM Smart Business Development & Test on the IBM Cloud, announced last year but put into action last spring in a partnership with Red Hat, allows enterprise clients to improve internal development and test processes with instant access to resources through IBM’s scalable cloud delivery model.

IBM has 10 high-performance data centres in operation on five continents set up to handle the workloads.

‘We’re moving what we call the Compute Cloud internally [which is the Smart Business Development & Test package on the IBM Cloud] forward – first by providing a wider range of cloud delivery centres globally, in addition to adding new functionality,” IBM Cloud Computing CTO Kristof Kloeckner told eWEEK.

“In addition to our two Linux environments, we are now offering the ability to provision Windows Data Centre Servers 2003 and 2008. Clients had been asking us for that,” Kloeckner said. “We also are adding the ability to do load-balancing through attaching multiple IP addresses, the ability to attach multiple disk volumes, and so on.”

Other added features include the ability to rapidly configure environments and easily share them across development teams, and the ability to attach combinations of storage sizes to an instance at the time of provisioning, ensuring higher performance and resiliency, Kloeckner said.

There is no question that cloud-based applications are drawing huge interest in the development community.

“We have customers that say they want to test and use their applications in a shared cloud environment and then bring them back into the enterprise,” Kloeckner said.

“They want to use the cloud as a sandbox because that gives you ease of access and also enforces a certain discipline because you have to fit into a shared, standardised environment.”

Kloeckner said that more and more CIOs he talks to want to use the cloud as a “transformation tool. Much of what they want to achieve is through greater standardisation of environments – of tools, of processes”.

“What we’re now offering [with these cloud platform enhancements] is the execution of these processes that the customers are actually after,” Kloeckner said.

IBM is putting its development cloud into a sort of “cadence”, Kloeckner said. “We shipped v1.1 back in August, v1.2 in October, we’re going to follow very shortly with v1.3 but you’ll see the steady evolution in more comprehensive test and development services,” he said.

A recent IBM survey of 2,000 IT professionals, backed up by studies from Gartner and Forrester, reported that cloud computing and mobile will emerge as the most in-demand platforms for software application development and IT delivery over the next five years.