A few corrections and considerations
IBM QuickStart Services is part of the overall IBM CloudBurst offering (i.e. HW + SW + Services) since its initial announcement in 2009. It's the fruit of a tight collaboration between IBM Hardware/Software/Services organizations.
Hardware:
- Disk is DS3400 instead of DS4300
- Storage capacity from 5,4 to 42 TB
- ... three of them can be crammed into the rack, for a total of 39 usable blades
In fact: two of them can be crammed into the rack, for a total of 27 usable blades
- IBM CloudBurst offers 1G or 10G uplink options to SAN via open standard interfaces.
- IBM CloudBurst can expand the cloud beyond the rack itself, and includes other IBM and OEM infrastructure components (servers, storage, ...).
- Most components in the rack such as network devices, switches, power distribution units are redundant.
- IBM CloudBurst offers granularity: small, medium, large configurations. Main parameters are: the number of blade servers, storage capacity and uplink speed to SAN (1G or 10G).
Software:
- The CloudBurst V1.1 service management pack was part of June announcement only.
- Since last November, v1.2 is shipped with IBM Tivoli Service Automation Manager (TSAM). It offers a Web 2.0 based Self-Service interface to ease the request of a Cloud Services. It includes a Service Catalog and accelerates the definition of a lifecycle of a services from a cloud services provider and cloud service user point of view. Further, it includes Tivoli Provisioning 7.1.1 (vs. 7.1 in the article), Tivoli Monitoring 6.2.2 (vs. 6.2.1 in the article) plus energy management capability, Tivoli Usage and Account Manager 7.1.2 to help IT charging back the users/consumers (e.g. Lines of Business) ... a key Cloud attribute: pay for what you use.
All these products are integrated.
- v1.2 supports both VMWare ESXi 3.5 and KVM hypervisors.
- IBM CloudBurst offers unique high availability and security options.
- and the list goes on ... see http://www-01.ibm.com/software/tivoli/products/cloudburst/ for more details and demo
Services:
- QuickStart Services have been conceived to offer a rapid deployment for the selected out-of-the-box IBM CloudBurst configuration.
- QuickStart Services can be tailored to meet additional client requirements such as integrations with client legacy systems, with existing service desk (by the way, TSAM also includes a Service Desk that can be activated, if needed), expand CloudBurst with other IBM/OEM servers/ storages in the cloud, provisioning to UNIX/AIX, z/VM Linux environments (in other words, CloudBurst is not just limited to x86), etc... Bottom line, price depends on ultimate client needs.
- Last but not least, IBM CloudBurst offers Single Delivery, Installation, Price and Single Support.
Thanks for your attention.