IBM PureFlex and SmartCloud Entry Allow Zetark to Help Customers Deploy Clouds Quickly

New SmartCloud portfolio reinforces IBM's commitment to open standards

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May 17, 2013, 12:18 ET

ARMONK, N.Y., May 17, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced that French Managed Services Provider (MSP) Zetark will deploy their enterprise cloud storage services on PureFlex running IBM SmartCloud Entry. IBM PureFlex provides Zetark with a fully integrated set of server, storage, network and management resources allowing them to provision new environments for customers rapidly and at low incremental cost.

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Established in 2012, as subsidiary of Groupe BECI, Zetark is a specialist provider of cloud-based storage and infrastructure-as-a-service solutions. As a start-up business, Zetark needed to quickly create a low-cost, scalable IT infrastructure in order to succeed. Energy efficiency was also an important consideration, both for environmental and cost reasons as the company wanted to bring its innovative cloud solution to market rapidly, without excessively high initial costs and with the ability to grow in the near future.

As a result of the new solution, Zetark has been able cut the typical customer deployment time from two months to just two weeks. Additionally, PureFlex delivers extremely low power consumption - just 750 watts for 1 PB of data storage - and allows customers to deploy virtual servers in just 30 seconds.

"SmartCloud Entry enables us to respond to customer needs, and gives us the ability to do granular billing based on their precise usage of memory, disk and processing resources. Our primary offering is centered on storage, but we also have the flexibility to offer a broader set of IaaS solutions," said Maxime Aernout, General Manager of Zetark. "The combination of the Linux KVM hypervisor with IBM SmartCloud Entry and PureFlex enables us to run a highly flexible yet low-cost infrastructure."

Today, IBM also announced that it is expanding its support for open standards in the Cloud computing market with the latest version of IBM SmartCloud Entry. Working with industry open standards groups - including the OpenStack community - IBM is helping to drive faster innovation and lower development costs by providing a common technology base for all SmartCloud Foundation offerings.

"As a Platinum Foundation member and active contributor to OpenStack, IBM is continuing to drive innovation while extending our leadership in support of open cloud standards," said Jacqueline Woods, Vice President, Global Marketing, Systems Software and Growth Initiatives, IBM Systems and Technology Group. "This newest release of IBM SmartCloud Entry provides an innovative, cost-effective cloud platform for a broad range of companies."

IBM SmartCloud Entry transforms virtualized systems into a ready-made, highly scalable cloud infrastructure that empowers end users with new services on demand. With today's announcement, IBM SmartCloud Entry now provides a greater selection of hypervisors to choose from. [1] SmartCloud Entry also includes an enhanced end-user Web portal for rapid self-service workload provisioning, as well as pre-configured virtual machine images that allow clients and Business Partners to further adapt their Cloud assets to meet their business needs.

The newest version of the IBM SmartCloud Entry product will be generally available June 14, for more information on IBM SmartCloud Entry visit: www.ibm.com/smartcloud

For more information on IBM PureSystems visit: www.ibm.com/puresystems

For more information on Zetark visit: www.zetark.fr

For IBM Business Partners visit: www.partnerworld.com/smartcloudentry

[1] Microsoft's Hyper-V joins VMware ESX, PowerVM, and KVM as supported options.

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SOURCE IBM