Cloud computing is certainly a hot topic these days. If an organization is not already using cloud computing, it has plans to do so. The economics, agility, and value offered by cloud computing is just too persuasive for IT organizations ignore.
Even the high-profile Amazon outage couldn’t slow cloud computing’s relentless march towards mainstream adoption. If anything, that outage helped make cloud computing more robust by highlighting the need for hardened policies and procedures around provisioning in the cloud.
IBM recently announced updates to a set of products that make it easy to deploy DB2 and InfoSphere Warehouse on private clouds:
- IBM Workload Deployer (previously know as WebSphere CloudBurst), which is a hardware/software appliance that streamlines the deployment and management of software on private clouds.
- IBM Transactional Database Pattern, which works with the IBM Workload Deployer to generate DB2 instances that are suitable for transactional workloads.
- IBM Data Mart Pattern, which generates InfoSphere Warehouse instances for data mart workloads.
These patterns consist of more than just deploying virtual images with pre-configured software. You should instead think of them as being like mini-applications for configuring and deploying a cloud-based database instances. Users specify information about the database, and then the pattern builds and deploys the database instance.
The Transactional Database Pattern is for OLTP deployments. It includes templates for sizing the virtual machine, database backup scheduling, database deployment cloning capabilities, and tooling (including Data Studio). The Data Mart Pattern incorporates the features to the OLTP pattern, together with deep compression and data movement tools. But, of course, it is configured and optimized for data mart workloads in a virtual environment.
