Ron Gordon
Director – Power Systems
At IBM, changes happen quite often, and sometimes without much fanfare, warning, or major headlines. A couple of these happened recently. One change was the addition of a lease option to the AIX operating system. This addition does not change the current license purchase option (the license purchase option has NO change to it). The new lease term is $26 per VPC (virtual processor core). This may be good for customers who need a short-term AIX environment, for such tasks as a short test period, a migration scenario, or cloud environments run by Managed Service Providers (MSPs). This lease is assigned to a customer number, not a system serial number, which provides flexibility in the movement of the AIX operating system. This is for the small tier-only systems (Scale Out and the Enterprise 850 and 850C) and is available for 7.1 and 7.2 versions. I think this is a good move by IBM, as it can save you, the customer, costs for transitory work.
The second change has to do with SUSE Linux. This is important for SUSE users, on all systems, and has high applicability to current and future users of SAP HANA. I will try not to confuse you, but you may have to read this several times.
SLES 11 (Big Endian) code 5639-S11 is being withdrawn June 16, 2017. The current SLES 12, 5639-12S (Little Endian) feature codes were withdrawn March 14, 2017, and new feature codes are being assigned. If you need SLES 11 for Big Endian support for SAP HANA or other applications, be aware that you will now order SLES 12 (5639-12S) with the new feature codes, and the download site will allow you to download either SLES 11 or SLES 12.
New feature codes and prices (I will not present nor discuss pricing figures, as there are too many) will now be for 1, 3, or 5 years. In each option, you have support of 1-2 sockets per subscription, but you now have to specify either 1-2 LPARs or Unlimited LPARs, which come at different price points. I will only mention that the starting point is the same as previous price points. Example: If you wish to run on two sockets worth of cores, you only need 1 subscription. If you need to run on 3 sockets (could be 36 cores with the 12-core processor) you will need 2 subscriptions, which would give you up to 48 cores and up to 4 LPARs, with the 1-2 LPAR feature code.
Next, which has not changed, is that you can have subscription only, with or without IBM TSS support. You can also have subscription with standard SUSE support, subscription with premium SUSE support, or the option of no SUSE support, but specify premium subscription only, which implies you will use IBM TSS Premium support.
Next is SLES SAP for Power (5639-SAP), which is now 1-2 Sockets with 1-2 LPARs or 1-2 Sockets with unlimited LPARs, both with a 5-year term, and each comes with SUSE Premium support. Two different prices. At download, you determine either SLES 11 or SLES 12.
Now, the last reminder. SLES is not supported on bare metal on Power. Since SLES does not ship a supported Power KVM, the supported virtualization engine is PowerVM, which implies no LC models nor bare metal on the L models or Scale Out models. Virtualization is supported on the L models, Scale Out and Enterprise models with PowerVM.
If you’re interested in having Mainline assist you in evaluating this or any other technology, please contact your Mainline Account Executive, or contact Mainline directly.