Ron Gordon
Director » Power Systems
On October 6, 2020, IBM announced significant updates to almost the entire Power System infrastructure software portfolio. Overall the changes and improvements designed to support customer needs can be viewed as upgrades to support the market trend of hybrid cloud automation, continued focus on improved security, and the industry need for business continuity and high availability of critical workloads. This blog will present a high-level view of the updates by product; Mainline is available to take the deeper dive into the new capabilities soon available for your datacenter’s IBM Power Systems.
Power Systems Software Announcements
Power HA System Mirror has announced the latest update in the 7.2.5 release. This will have improvements to the GUI, enhancements for Global Volume Manger (GLVM) and a configuration wizard for Disaster Recovery setup. This plus the new health check of the source and targets makes this release valuable for business continuity needs and usage. Additionally, Power VM Recovery Manager 1.5 was announced with improvements in HA thru DR support and SRIOV mappings. Both of these products have their availability set for November 11, 2020.
PowerVC 2.0 was announced with an availability date of December 4, 2020. This will have a new and easier to use GUI, Global Mirror enabled for IBM Spectrum Virtualize for storage replication, set up, and management within the private cloud that PowerVC creates. Also functions for volume cloning, MFA support, and new Dynamic Resource Optimizer policies enabled.
Speaking of IBM PowerSC MFA, 1.3 is the new release of MFA and is enabled for AIX but also Linux (Redhat and SUSE) and IBMi. This means that clients running Power Systems with AIX, IBMi, and Linux can implement a consistent MultiFactor Authentication methodology and policy within their enterprise. GA is planned for November 13, 2020.
PowerVM is used by most all customers using Power System. The latest 3.1.2 release brings NPIV acceleration by use of multi-queue support and the release had add trusted boot for the VIOS as well as tool to support VIOS maintenance and backup via the HMC. Planned availability is November 13, 2020.
IBM announced that the Virtual HMC will be upgraded with 9.2.950 support and include the VIOS backup capability. The 950 level is also available for the HMC appliances and 950 code is needed to support the new G models of the IBM Power Systems POWER9 scale out family.
AIX will release AIX 7.2 TL5 with enhancements to Live Update, security, and has added NVMeOF support for the new NVMe adapters and will support the IBM 9200 storage with the November 13, 2020 availability.
IBMi has announced updates to IBMi 7.3 TR9 and IBMi 7.4 TR3 both to GA November 13, 2020. The enhancements include changes to Db2 for i and inclusion of additional open source code and frameworks.
The final updated release I will present is the latest change to IBM Power Systems Enterprise Cloud Edition 1.1.3 with a GA of November 13, 2020. This update includes the latest MFA 1.3 code as well as the latest VMR 1.5 mentioned above as well as the Aspera release 4 acceleration code.
Availability of Power Systems Scale-Out Models for SAP HANA
IBM also announced the November 20, 2020 availability of two new Power Systems models to support SAP HANA workloads in Power Systems scale-out systems, the Power Systems 922H and the Power Systems 924H. These new models provide an attractive cost benefit for midrange servers to support the latest SAP HANA software. These systems are upgraded from prior versions of the 922H and 924H with full support of PCIe Gien4 in adapter slots for higher performance.
Additional Hardware Announcements
From a hardware perspective, IBM Power Systems announced the availability new SSDs up to 7.44 TBs, a new PCIe Gen4 NVMe flash adapter for AIX and IBM i, and a new 2 port 16Gb FC adapter. These new adapters provide higher capacity and higher performance capabilities. Planned availability is November 20, 2020.
More Information
For a deeper dive on these announcements or to learn how IBM Power Systems can support business modernization, contact your Mainline Account Executive directly or click here to contact us.
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