Enabling enterprise-level workloads in the enterprise-class cloud

Enterprise-level workloads, such as systems applications and products (SAP) workloads, require infrastructure with high availability, clustering, or physical server appliances, features that are often not a part of a typical cloud offering. Thus, businesses are often forced to run enterprise workloads in their legacy environments and cannot take advantage of the cloud computing flexibility, elasticity, and low cost. To enable enterprise customers to use these workloads in a cloud, we enabled a large number of SAP enterprise-level workloads in the IBM Cloud Managed Services (CMS) cloud for virtualized and nonvirtualized cloud environments. In this high-level paper, we discuss various general challenges and lessons learned, using a diverse set of platforms implemented in the IBM CMS cloud offering.