IBM's Test and Dev Cloud

IBM is beta-testing its own cloud at https://www-180.ibm.com/cloud/enterprise/beta/dashboard, after a successful experiment creating machine templatest with Amazon EC2.

As a company with hardware and operating system roots, it was smart to get on to the cloud bandwagon, which is essentially the commoditization of hardware and operating systems.

A plain Suse instance was not a problem. However, after some initial trouble launching a WebSphere Portal/WCM instance in the wrong-sized machine, I was able to launch an instance in a 'small' machine. I only tried it once, but a WebSphere sMash instance did not launch. My first impression is good -- for a beta-testing environment, and quick proofs of concept, it is very handy.

If you know Amazon EC2, the management console should be pretty much intuitive. The only time I had to read the good online help was when I needed to know the exact user to be used for the SSH session into an instance.

Let us wait and see how IBM manages to position this offering once it is out of beta.