IBM launched its CloudBurst solution last month, which the company says, will allow companies/anybody to set up their own cloud service offering in a matter of days.

Well, you’ve heard of data centre in a box. CloudBurst is essentially cloud computing in a box (package?) Everything you need to create a cloud platform, complete with an integrated self service portal, service catalog, virtualization, comes built in with CloudBurst. In fact, IBM says that it is designed for “lights-out” automated operation, so no hands needed.

You can check out the full details of CloudBurst from this blog post from IBM.

Or watch this video

It’s obviously targeting enterprises who want to put in place a cloud infrastructure for their internal IT clients. There’s no billing mechanism mentioned in the post. However, there are specific features that should prove very useful for enterprises, i.e. the platform automatically provisions required server capacity for new users and applications as they are needed. More importantly, it will also de-provision unused capacity when they are no longer needed.

To support CloudBurst, you’d need a 42U rack with 1 IBM BladeCentre Chassis, 1 3650M2 Management Server with 8 cores and 24GB of RAM, a HS22 CloudBurst Management Blade with 8 cores and 48GB of RAM, 3 managed HS22 blades with 8 cores and 48GB of RAM each and some DS3400 FC attached storage, IBM says.

And according to a report from AsiaPulse, IBM plans to launch the solution in Japan by 18 August with a starting price of 24.5 million yen, or US$262,615. I’m pretty sure that doesn’t include the data centre infrastructure that you’d need to house the CloudBurst environment.

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