IBM has staged its Pulse event this week in Las Vegas to showcase virtualization, image management, and cloud computing technologies, including newly announced software that can 'instantly' virtualize a data center within minutes. The company says that these new technologies build on IBM's existing provisioning and image deployment capabilities for virtualized cloud environments.

According to IDC, in 2009, approximately $17 billion was spent on cloud-related technologies, hardware, and software -- and that by 2013 that spending is expected to grow to $45 billion. Cloud computing is clearly gaining share of voice in the IT ecosphere as a result of its ability to provide dynamic scheduling, provisioning, and management of virtualized computing resources on demand.

Now available as an open beta program, IBM's advanced virtual deployment software proposes to give developers the opportunity to rapidly build a cloud environment with dynamic provisioning and scheduling of server resources -- two capabilities at the core of cloud functionality. The new IBM software provides an "image management" system to help install, configure, and automate the creation of new virtual machines.

IBM's new virtual management software hinges around the announcement of IBM Tivoli Provisioning Manager 7.2 -- a product built to help organizations manage virtual computing resources with automation tools for data center provisioning activities, including provisioning software for image federation and deployment across heterogeneous infrastructures. The new software enables development teams to rapidly deploy images in order to provide high value applications, while the automated provisioning helps control image sprawl, reduce cost, and optimize resources.

IBM Tivoli Storage Manager for Virtual Environments includes features that:

• Utilize VMware's vStorage APIs for Data Protection, including block-level incremental backups based on VMware's Changed Block Tracking
• Offload the backup workload from virtual machines and production VMware ESX hosts to vStorage backup servers
• Provide flexible recovery options -- file, volume, or image -- from a single-pass backup
• Centralize and simplify management with IBM Tivoli Storage Manager

IBM has also demonstrated technologies that provide a centralized management platform for hybrid cloud environments for both on and off premise deployments. The new technology extends service management capabilities such as governance, monitoring, and security across physical and virtualized resources in private and public clouds as well as traditional physical deployments.