Ron Gordon
Director, IBM Power Systems
IBM Power Systems made several significant software announcements on May 3, 2022, that progress Power Systems capabilities. Enhanced licensing options for EP2.0, a new hybrid cloud offering, AIX Open Source changes, and the IBM i 7.5 announcement are all part of this latest software announcement and should be review by all IBM Power Systems users.
Enterprise Pools 2.0 – Dynamic Utility Charge
I’d like to start with a change to IBM Power Systems Private Cloud Shared Utility Capacity also known as Enterprise Pools 2.0 or EP2.0. This significant change is that the dynamic utility charge can now occur via a post-billed process. This means that rather than requiring EP2.0 customers to pay for capacity credits up front, they can choose to have post-usage monthly billing and pay only for usage as it’s incurred. While this may mean that IT organizations need to work with accounting so that monthly purchase orders for usage over base is supported by the business, it also means there is no need to have pre-purchased capacity credits not knowing if and when they might be used, and having to monitor the status of pre-purchased capacity credits. Some businesses may be concerned about monthly PO’s but I view this as being similar to cloud billing which is also monthly usage-based and likely variable, and most businesses do have cloud accounts. Another benefit to those that do not have EP2.0 yet is that enablement of EP2.0 does not require advanced purchase of capacity credits. Maybe more important to you is that the cost of a capacity credit is still $240 but the amount of capacity has increased, effectively reducing the price of capacity usage.
IBM Power Hybrid Cloud Management Edition
Another addition to the IBM software portfolio if the new packaged offering called IBM Power Hybrid Cloud Management Edition. This solution offering consists of 5 individual products including:
- IBM Cloud Pak for Watson AIOps (ICP4WAIOps) – provides a consolidated view of on premises and cloud IT sources
- INSTANA – for observability and monitoring of on-premises and cloud AIX, IBM i, Linux, and Red Hat Open Shift Container Platform (OCP) in a hybrid cloud environmen
- Turbonomics – provides real time workload, performance, and cost optimization for hybrid cloud environments
- Red Hat OpenShift – for container-based Kubernetes Dev/Ops and deployments of containerized environments
- Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management – for Open Shift container management
The overall goal of the Power Hybrid Cloud Management Edition is to optimize the management and automation of the rapidly evolving, container-based, modern development environment.
Open Source Support
IBM Power Systems AIX has announced fee support for the Open Source software in the Open Source tool kit. This will enable support for a specified list of Open Source software products and a per product list of additional Open Source software products that can be compiled to run on AIX releases instead of running on Linux for better integration with AIX capabilities. Before this offering integrating Open Source code with only community support was an inhibitor to run Open Source with mission critical workloads. With this change of support for the Open Source code, IBM Power has removed this inhibitor and should pave the way for customers to revisit how Open Source products can be utilized in mission critical environments.
IBM i 7.5 General Availability (GA)
IBM i 7.5 will GA on May 5, 2022. The following is a brief explanation of the capabilities in the 7.5 release:
1) Just a reminder, as of 1/25/2022, IBM offered customers the ability to acquire a Virtual Serial Number (VSN) and assign it to a logical partition. IBM i software can then be ordered on or transferred to the VSN partition instead of being tied to a physical hardware IBM Power Systems serial number. Having the IBM i entitlement, keys, and support entitlement on a VSN provides the flexibility to move a VM to a different Power machine. This is for POWER9 and Power10 systems only and does not apply to PowerVS migration.
2) IBM i Simplification is packaging several of the additional licensed program products to be entitled in the base IBM i license. While not all LPPs are now included, additional LPPs, such as BRMS, Db2 WebQuery, and HA for IBM i are still individually priced.
3) IBM i has extended its licensing options to include a subscription model. While there is a phased roll out of this, the objective is to support an option to enable migrations while providing a different cost model. Initially this will be offered on the P05 tier, however it would be fair to assume this will be extended to other tiers soon.
4) A significant addition to the IBM i portfolio of products is Merlin which stand for Modernization Engine foR Lifecycle IntegrationN (kind of magical wizard like stuff!). IBM i Merlin is a set of tools which run in OpenShift containers, which guide and assist software developers in the modernization of IBM i applications and development processes and allow them to realize the value of a hybrid cloud, multi-platform DevOps implementation. This is a graphical view of Merlin:
6) NVMe identification information added to the Service tools
7) TCP addition of Selective Acknowledgement Support (SACK)
8) Security enhancements throughout many facilities in IBM i
9) Support for 240 cores in Power10 systems
10) Db2 Mirror support for mixed systems support for 7.4 and 7.5
11) BRMS enhancements for more granular support of execution of backup and recovery
Summary
This major IBM POWER software announcement extends the flexibility in licensing, new AIX Open Source support options, and enhanced hybrid cloud features, as well as the soon-to-be available IBM i 7.5 release. As this was a brief overview only, please contact me or your Mainline representative for more information on how your business can benefit from these enhancements.
More Information
For further assistance and information on IBM Power Systems on premises, in hybrid cloud environments, or in cloud environments, please reach out to me, to your Mainline representative, or contact us here with any questions.
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