IBM Offers Freebie SmartCloud Slices--Again

Published: September 24, 2012

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Big Blue really, really, really wants you to try out its SmartCloud public cloud, and to try to get you hooked on the idea of IBM managing your infrastructure for you, the company is giving away freebie slices on the SmartCloud in various geographies.

The promotion is running on IBM's website, and has been spotted in recent weeks in various announcement letters in smaller geographies. And it is the SmartCloud Enterprise variant with 64-bit and 32-bit X86 processors, which have been virtualized and can be set up to run Microsoft's Windows Server 2003 or 2008, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, or SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. You get 250 GB of persistent storage for your virtual machines, and you can ask for SmartCloud Enterprise object storage for extra files (up to 100 GB in capacity) to play around with. Various IBM middleware, database, analytics, and development tools can also be fired up on the SmartCloud images for free, too, during the promotion, which are listed here.

The freebie promotion runs through November 11, and is not open to existing SmartCloud Enterprise customers. Sorry, but this freebie is only for newbies. You can provision virtual machines in IBM's data centers in Raleigh (North Carolina), Ehningen (Germany), Toronto (Canada), Boulder (Colorado), Tokyo (Japan), and Singapore.

This is not the first time IBM has offered customers free trials on the SmartCloud. IBM did it in April 2011, and then again in September 2011. And it will likely do it again in the new year, too. Amazon Web Services just went all the way last year and made freebie baby cloud slices a part of its product line, akin to open source projects giving away their code hoping customers will grow into the more complex tools that have quasi-proprietary extensions that cost money.

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