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A hybrid solution is created when private (on-premises) and public (off-premises) services are used together.

 Ashok IyengarWritten by Ashok K. Iyengar

Editor’s note: This article is an excerpt from the book IBM Cloud Platform Primer.

 

A hybrid is a mixture or fusion of two different elements. Hybrid cars, for example, are a combination of a gasoline engine and an electric motor, with both having the ability to propel the vehicle. A hybrid cloud combines the resources available in a private cloud with those in the public cloud while both continue to function as independent and unique entities. Thus, a hybrid cloud offers the benefits of multiple deployment models. Why not use just a public cloud or a private cloud? The answer lies in economics, speed, and privacy, which are the major forces that drive enterprises to hybrid cloud solutions.

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Unlike cloud hosting services, cloud managed services leave the hardware at the customer site. However, many of the issues potential customers have are similar.

john gristWritten by John Ghrist

Last month's Technology Focus looked at cloud-hosting services for the IBM i and some of the issues that have impeded more widespread adoption of hosting services use. A strong alternative to cloud hosting providers is offered by managed service providers (MSPs), which also use the cloud or Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) for connectivity, but that instead offer administrative and other services for servers remaining on customer premises.

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IBM Power Systems in the cloud is bigger than you might think. And it's a growing ecosystem.

steve pitcherWritten by Steve Pitcher
Joining me this week to talk about the cloud component of CAMSS (Cloud, Analytics, Mobile, Social, and Security) is IBM's Alise Spence, IBM's Power Systems Cloud Offerings Product Manager. Alise is responsible for setting the strategic direction for the offerings IBM brings to market for public, private, and hybrid cloud solutions.

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It can be tempting to save on systems operations costs by turning to a cloud hosting service. However, connectivity, security, and loss of control remain significant issues.

john gristWritten by John Ghrist

Cloud hosting is one of those ideas whose time seems to have arrived. The cost savings of managing in-house servers combined with the economies of scale that hosting providers can enjoy by offering such services to many companies on their own in-house systems, coupled with the ubiquity of the Internet, make hosting an attractive option on both sides of the table.

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Is there a difference between services available in a private cloud and those available in a public cloud?

Ashok IyengarWritten by Ashok K. Iyengar

Editor's note: This article is excerpted from chapter 5 of IBM Cloud Platform Primer.

 

A key distinction between Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) is the type of service offered by each segment. With IaaS, consumers usually work with virtualized servers, which they can configure themselves, whereas with PaaS, the consumer uses and works with services that are created and maintained by the cloud service provider. Figure 1 captures the basic differences between IaaS and PaaS.

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A carefully executed data migration plan and the right migration technology can make cloud a viable option for scalable data storage.

ian mastersWritten by Ian Masters

As organizations continue to amass vast amounts of data, cloud has come to the fore as a solution that can meet growing storage demands. A notable 64 percent of respondents to Vision Solutions 2015 State of Resilience Report, which surveyed IT professionals, said that their organizations currently use cloud services. The number has more than doubled since 2011, when just 23 percent of respondents used the cloud.

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If you need a better answer for in-house data backup services but can't afford full-blown high-availability solutions, here are some other options.

john gristWritten by John Ghrist

Thirty years ago (or maybe as recently as last night at some small businesses), a "typical" in-house backup and recovery strategy was to back up all the hard drives on the server and hang the tape in a library until next week, when it would be time to overwrite "Monday's" tape with next Monday's backup.

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BRMS is the strategic tool for backup and recovery support for the IBM i, but how many of us really understand it? In many ways, it's intuitive. But there are still some things you should know.

david shireyWritten by David Shirey

BRMS. Backup Restore Media Services.

 

If you're in the i world, then this is IBM's strategic tool for you to control your backups and, in the event something awful happens, your recovery. It provides a fairly large range of options and also a structure that helps you organize your backups and tell the difference between them a little easier than remembering that BK0703C is the monthly backup and BK0702C is the daily backup. I like to think of BRMS as a two-headed beast.

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