Gartner Says by 2020 “Cloud Shift” Will Affect More Than $1 Trillion in IT Spending. *
“Cloud-first strategies are the foundation for staying relevant in a fast-paced world,” said Ed Anderson, research vice president at Gartner. “The market for cloud services has grown to such an extent that it is now a notable percentage of total IT spending, helping to create a new generation of start-ups and “born in the cloud” providers,” he further added. *
Are you in this new breed and ready to take your share of this cloud spending?
Then it’s time you need to seriously consider selling cloud servers, and can there be a better way to begin than IBM SoftLayer cloud?
IBM SoftLayer Cloud: An Introduction
An IBM company – SoftLayer’s cloud servers are secure, scalable, high-capacity, possess enterprise-class capabilities and come in flexible configuration.
With the changing times, the infrastructural needs of an organization are also witnessing dynamic changes. IBM SoftLayer cloud servers help a business scale resources as per its needs, along with letting it pay for what it uses, unlike traditional methods of hosting like dedicated servers, which not only make a business pay more than what it needs, but also put a cap on the innovation, flexibility and the capabilities of the IT teams.
SoftLayer cloud servers are built with robust hardware and utilize the globally distributed network infrastructure, which is an impressive number of 13 data centers housing approximately 200,000 servers. These datacenters located across the globe, ensure a good amount of bandwidth to the customers.
The need for automation:
With digitization, the time is short everywhere. Now, the customers too don’t have it, so they order things online, and want them delivered with the click of a button.
Automation helps you to speed up your service delivery without manual intervention, thus, reducing time and the hassles associated with it, like accidental errors.
The need for IBM cloud service automation:
Through automation of cloud business processes, the cloud service providers can reduce their expenses, incurred due to extra resources and the redundant infrastructure.
Automation provides customers with more control on their IBM cloud services and self-sufficiency, while it helps system administrators with better management through lesser manual involvement.
There are a number of best cloud orchestration and provisioning tools out there, but RackNap – a cloud orchestration and automation software, enables cloud service providers to provision and deliver IBM SoftLayer Cloud services, as well as manage them completely from a single pane of glass.
RackNap – absolute automation of IBM SoftLayer Cloud provisioning, delivery and management
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RackNap provides complete automation of IBM cloud provisioning and management, post delivery
SoftLayer API integration with RackNap enables IBM cloud orchestration and automation of delivery and management, within seconds of order placement.
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Automated cloud metering and billing by RackNap in the backend ensures seamless payment processing and invoice generation, while provisioning of SoftLayer IBM cloud initiates in the IBM panel.
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The customer can log in his client panel to see his cloud service details, configuration, IP address, payment and renewal details etc.
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RackNap – an IBM cloud orchestrator, provides full control to customers and system administrators.
RackNap automatically terminates a cloud server in case of no-payment, but it also ensures that system administrators have enough powers to manually terminate a client server, whenever it’s needed.
Through RackNap’s client panel:
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The customer can manage his cloud via Server Control Center.
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He can ‘Pause’ and ‘Resume’ his server via Power Control section.
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He can view his cloud server configuration, including datacenter, OS, memory, hostname, bandwidth usage etc. via Resources section.
Through RackNap’s admin panel:
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System administrators can see full service details, billing information, resource consumption and more at one place.
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They can send a required notification mail in a single click, from the ready templates.
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They can manually ‘Create’, ‘Pause’, ‘Resume’ or ‘Terminate’ the IBM cloud.
The changes done either by the client or the system administrators are automatically updated in the SoftLayer IBM panel, in real time.
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Key Takeaways:
Few benefits of selling IBM SoftLayer cloud servers through RackNap include, but are not limited to:
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With SoftLayer virtualization services running both analytics software and latest OS, one gets the best cloud infrastructure that is there.
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You can provide infrastructure on demand to your customers in a number of data centers around the globe.
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With a cloud automation platform like RackNap, you can easily sell cloud servers with your existing offerings.
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Through automation, you can shorten your time to market cloud services and differentiate your products by designing customized solutions for your customers, thus, staying steps ahead of your competition.
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You get the best of both worlds – best cloud brand and best cloud automation platform to completely automate all your business processes.
Sources:
* http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/3384720
Image –
https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/community/blogs/5things/entry/5_things_to_know_about_softlayer?lang=en
