Amazon expands EC2 with IBM applications

Amazon has announced the launch of Amazon EC2 running IBM, comprising of Amazon EC2 instances combined with popular IBM applications that users can pay for by the hour with no need for licenses or long term upfront commitments.

System administrators can flexibly scale IBM applications up and down and only pay for what is effectively used. If you already have an existing IBM license, you may also have the ability to run that license in Amazon EC2 as well, by simply pay the service's normal Amazon EC2 hourly prices for On-Demand or Reserved Instances.

The hourly prices for Amazon EC2 running IBM are as follows:
• Amazon EC2 running IBM DB2 Express - starting at $0.38/hour
• Amazon EC2 running IBM DB2 Workgroup - starting at $1.31/hour
• Amazon EC2 running IBM Informix Dynamic Server Express - starting at $0.38/hour
• Amazon EC2 running IBM Informix Dynamic Server Workgroup - starting at $1.31/hour
• Amazon EC2 running IBM WebSphere sMash - starting at $0.50/hour
• Amazon EC2 running IBM Lotus Web Content Management - starting at $2.48/hour
• Amazon EC2 running IBM WebSphere Portal Server and IBM Lotus Web Content Management Server - starting at $6.39/hour

Amazon EC2 running IBM requires no commitments or long-term contracts. Administrators can find Amazon EC2 running IBM AMIs in the AWS Management Console or ElasticFox by searching for them with the keyword "ec2-paid-ibm-amis".