Ron Gordon
Director » Power Systems
Get Ready for IBM Power Systems Technical University Las Vegas:
A Power Systems Announcement Overview to Help you Build your Agenda
Power Systems Technical University, which is the Power Systems component of the IBM Systems Technical University, is scheduled for October 7 through October 11 at the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas. This is concurrent with the IBM Z and IBM Storage Technical Universities. I have often heard there are too many great sessions to attend, and participants need to choose carefully since most sessions are only presented one time.
Although many of you are repeat attendees, some of you will be attending for the first time or attending after missing several years. To help you better choose sessions for creating your personal agenda and deep dive at Tech U, this blog offers a high-level review of some of the latest IBM announcements, as well as advances in IBM Power Systems and IBM Power Systems software.
- IBM i
- End of Support for POWER7 models
- Power Systems 980 enhanced Health Care editions
- VM Recovery Manager for HA and DR
- IBM Power Virtual Server in the IBM Cloud
- HMC offerings
- AIX 7.2 TL 2
- PowerVM 3.1.1
- ICP and ICP for Data
- Enterprise Pools 2.0
- Redhat
IBM i 7.4 was announced and is available with major updates to security, and programming tooling. But, to me, the major update is Db2 Mirroring, where two systems can be connected to two different SANs that are kept real-time synchronized, via ROCE adapters. This has tremendous capabilities as HA copy, but it can also support distributed data to local systems providing higher response times.
IBM has announced September 30, 2019 end of support for POWER7 systems and December 2020 for POWER7+ systems. While there are options for extended support, planning now is critical for POWER7 and POWER7+ users.
The IBM Power Systems 980 is now available in 3 and/or 4 CEC Healthcare editions. Several healthcare providers have been waiting for this announcement to support the higher capacity and performance that is needed for large institutions.
IBM Graphically Dispersed Resiliency has been renamed and expanded with VM Recovery Manager for HA and a separate version for DR. This, coupled with the Enterprise CBU offering, can provide a very good lower cost, less complex HA/DR solution, where RTO is not critical.
IBM Power Virtual Server in the IBM Cloud is now available with a Pay-as-you-Go model or an annual-cost model. The current server support is with Power Systems 922s and 880s with V7000 for storage, and there are 950 and 980 plans in place for future. The supported environments are AIX 7.1 and 7.2, as well as IBM i 7.3. Linux will be a future add.
The HMC plans will be reviewed; but realize that the current support is for the POWER based CR1 HMC appliance, while the virtual appliances for x86 and Power Systems are also available. I have seen many of our customers moving to the CR1 with the purchase of POWER9 systems and also investing in the Virtual Power HMC, instead of investing in two hardware appliances. This provides more flexibility and saves costs.
AIX 7.2 TL2 is the current AIX release and contains a DSO update, 32TB LPARs, new NVMe support, iSCSI MPIO, improvements in Live Update, and Security. Many of our customers have moved to this release to exploit these features, especially the DSO improvements and security enhancements, which are always important today.
Power VM 3.1 is rebased to AIX 7.2 and has added compressed and encrypted LPM to provide higher security and faster partition mobility.
IBM has renamed and reorganized the ICP and ICP for Data products into a quintuplet of products called Cloud Paks, which are designed to enable container-based application development, managed by Kubernetes, to run on premise or in public cloud environments, seamlessly. These new offerings have been developed to run on Red Hat OpenShift.
Enterprise Pools 2.0 (which has no relationship to Enterprise Pools 1.0) is a new usage model for Power Systems 980s, where fully provisioned 980s with all cores and memory activated are put on the customers floor; the customer pays for a base amount of usage; as the aggregate resource usage is exceeded, the user is billed on a minute usage interval. The IBM Cloud Management Console is required for IBM Enterprise Pools 2.0 to do the real-time monitoring and monthly billing.
And last but not the least, the IBM Red Hat acquisition has completed. I suspect there will be several sessions presenting the array of Red Hat solutions including Ansible, Open Shift, Open Stack, and of course Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.0, which was also announced.
While this is a quick high-level overview before the Power Systems Technical University, you can always access the www.ibm.com website and search other topics of interest (eg PowerSC, EP 1.0, PowerHA, etc.), but I think you can see that IBM development has been very busy creating new support and functionality for IBM Power Systems.
Actions to take:
1) Check the IBM Power Technical University website for the agenda, as it becomes available, so you can do early planning on the topics critical to your organization.
2) Mainline is an IBM Platinum Business Partner and will be holding a customer reception at Morels Steak House in the Palazzo Hotel on Wednesday evening. Come and talk with the Mainline executives and SMEs in Power, Storage, System z and Software.
To learn more please contact your Mainline Account Executive directly, or click here to contact us with any questions..
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