IBM parks beta cloud on development and test servers

IBM on Thursday kicked off a free public beta of a new cloud computing development and test environment that's hosted on Big Blue's machines.

The company also added new tools and services made special for testing cloud-based apps in a private cloud.

IBM Smart Business Development and Test on IBM Cloud (yes, they put the company name in there twice) provides customizable virtual machines and storage space along with IBM Rational Software Delivery Services, WebSphere, and Information Management software in the package. The service, (SBDaToIC, we suppose) supports Java, .NET, and open-source environments, the company said.

IBM claims businesses can provision themselves a fresh test environment in hours, or in some cases, just minutes.

An IBM spokeswoman told us the beta will be open and free until general availability, scheduled for the first quarter of 2010. Pricing and pay models haven't yet been worked out.

The company is also adding support for private cloud infrastructure to its existing IBM Rational Software Delivery Services for Cloud Computing toolset. It reckons the service will appeal to businesses who like the application lifecycle management tools, but prefer the governance and control of their own cloud environment.

The offering bundles a set of best practices for "agile development" in an enterprise, services for test management and planning, and a set of tools like asset-tracking software. And of course, it's also available with IBM's new cloud testing platform.

Curious developers can poke around IBM's development and testing platform on the IBM Cloud here. ®