Director of Power Systems
IBM Power Systems recently announced new functionality in IBM Cloud Orchestrator, IBM Cloud Manager with OpenStack, PowerVC, and the new Novalink component of PowerVM. This clearly demonstrates Power System’s direction in OpenStack as the virtualization enabler. The announcements of ICO 2.5 with improved structure, PowerVC 1.3.1 supporting the latest OpenStack release, and Novalink, which enables PowerVC and various other OpenStack implementations to directly provision via PowerVM without going thru an HMC, are significant and should be reviewed in more details by all customers. Power System’s provisioning through the Power Hypervisor and PowerVM can now be performed via the HMC, or additionally now via Novalink, with the user interface still provided by PowerVC or ICM or ICO. IBM is working closely with the OpenStack community to provide PowerVM drivers and APIs. The results can be demonstrated by the availability of VMware vRealize also being able to directly provision Power Systems. With IBM contributing PowerVM drivers to the OpenStack community (with significant Nova components), the functionality of OpenStack and PowerVM is coming available to system administrators, developers, and solution providers. And, as OpenStack can provision many operating environments and hardware platforms, this news is being widely accepted and implemented by both customers and solution providers. Having a common technology (OpenStack) being able to support multiple hypervisors and multiple platforms is going to save customers administration time, costs, and skill development, while providing a common interface to end-users. My opinion is that investment in OpenStack enabled technology should become the strategic direction of all customers who wish to implement both virtualization and “clouds.”