WHITE PAPER: A Cost-Benefit Analysis of the IBM Computing on Demand Cloud Offering

Compute on Demand Infrastructure

This Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud offering has seven global Compute on Demand Centers currently in operation, members have access to over 10,000 HPC compute cluster cores, 50 Terabyes of IBM storage, the latest interconnects and more. Each center offers capacity on a variety of systems ranging from clusters of System p, System x, and BladeCenter servers. You can choose the hardware and operating system you need to support your application. At your request, we can load the following Operating systems:

  • LinuxTM
  • Microsoft® Windows®
  • IBM AIX®

With Compute on Demand, you can choose to run on several different supercomputing configurations.

Compute Capacity

  • IBM BladeCenter® or System x® Intel® Xeon 32 and 64 bit servers
  • IBM BladeCenter® or System x® AMD OpteronTM 32-/64-bit servers
    • Linux®
    • Microsoft® Windows®
  • IBM System p POWER 5+TM 64-bit servers
    • Linux
    • IBM AIX 5LTM
  • Choice of interconnects: 100/Gigabit Ethernet, Infiniband, Myrinet

Servers

  • Management Node
  • Storage Nodes

Storage

  • Fiber Channel, SCSI
  • Direct attach, SAN

Management Software

  • xCAT (Extreme Cluster Administration Toolkit) - for distributed computing management and provisioning
  • IBM Director - for managing individual xSeries servers
  • IBM General Parallel File System (GPFS) on MultiplatformsTM (optional)

Networking & Security

  • ITAR Government workload capable
  • Virtual Private Network (VPN)
  • VLANs
  • Firewalls
  • Intrusion detection
  • Central switch redundancy
  • Edge switches
  • Terminal servers
  • Router/Switch Access Controls
  • Layer 3 Security Controls - IP Red Zone Subnets

NOTE: Customers are responsible for all third-party software licensing agreements.