IBM’s CloudBust may not be as innovative as it claims to be

IBM announced the release of its new offering, WebSphere CloudBurst, this month with much pomp and circumstance.

The new product allows firms to make use of “private” cloud computing, and, according to IBM, speed up the process of testing and then rolling out new business applications. IBM’s general manager for Application and Integration Middleware division Tom Rosamilia, explained the advantages of the product in details: “About a year ago we started talking with customers about where the pain points were around cloud, and this is the resulting product," he began.

"You're doing development or modelling on someone else's cloud and making use of their services. The usage cases will be those you're willing to allow outside your environment. With the private cloud, you're doing the same thing but inside your firewall.

“Traditionally you've had to provision for peak use so your servers can stand up. With CloudBurst, you can dispense images so you can quickly bring up capacity and bring it back down again," he concluded.

This all sounds cutting edge, but, according to Inatech’s Simon Ellis, it is an approach that has already been used at length before now. “IBM’s latest announcement is in my opinion a small evolutionary step for clients either currently using virtualisation or cloud solutions."

“IBM takes elements of both and allows IT departments to provide cloud services internally through the deployment of their appliance. However, most tech savvy organisations are already following this approach: using virtualisation for provisioning on demand in their datacentres. Adding the word ‘Cloud’ doesn’t mean it really is new, but is perhaps a re-branding or evolution of something that already exists today."

“The use of an appliance means that it may be easier for some customers to get started as they can effectively buy it off the shelf, but in essence it’s nothing that most vendors and savvy IT organisations can do today, potentially for less cost.”