Availability of Red Hat Software on IBM Power Systems for Hybrid Cloud Capabilities

IBM Corp. announced availability of Red Hat software on Power Systems as well as new Power Systems hardware.

These announcements expand the company systems’s commitment to help clients modernize by empowering them with the technology from Red Hat, Inc. to develop cloud-native applications and deploy them into hybrid cloud environments.

Announcements include:

• Expanded Red Hat Capabilities on Power Systems – Power Systems now features Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Power Virtual Server leveraging OpenShift’s baremetal installeri, Red Hat Runtimes, and newly certified Red Hat Ansible Content Collections.

• Power Private Cloud Rack Solution – Providing clients an optimized, production-level OpenShift platform to modernize traditional environments with cloud-native applications, the Power Private Cloud Rack combines on-premises hardware, a complete software stack of the company and Red Hat technology, and installation from the IBM systems Lab Services to deliver 49% lower cost per request as compared to similarly equipped x86-based platforms ⁽ⁱⁱ⁾.

• Extended Dynamic Capacity – Enhancements to Power System’s dynamic capacity to scale compute capacity across the hybrid cloud on Linux, IBM i, and AIX.

“Twelve months ago, IT practitioners faced a vastly different landscape before the world was transformed by the global Covid-19 pandemic,” said Stephen Leonard, GM, cognitive systems. “But despite the challenges, they recognize that a hybrid cloud approach can offer 2.5x the value derived from a single public cloud, as measured by an IBM internal, assessment by IBM’s Institute of Business Value ⁽ⁱⁱⁱ⁾. IBM Power Systems, along with the greater IBM and Red Hat portfolio, plays a critical role in this transition to hybrid environments.“

Power Systems and Red Hat drive client success with hybrid cloud
Shree Cement Ltd., one of India’s largest cement producers with nearly $2 billion in revenue last year, has selected Power9-based Power systems to run a combination of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and AIX to help them modernize their IT infrastructure with hybrid cloud. When it needed to streamline their supply chain while also increasing its computing capacity, they knew they needed to refresh their existing x86-based infrastructure.

“We were in the midst of technology modernization and were looking for a dependable IT Infrastructure support that could deliver 24/7 capabilities and integrate the operations, logistics, resources, export-import supply chain,” said Manoranjan Kumar, CIO, Shree Cement. “The 2 OSs on IBM Power Systems, namely IBM AIX and Red Hat Enterprise Linux, helped us move away from vertical business silo approach. This allows us to operate horizontally across the company to bring in synergy amongst multiple manufacturing plants to drive business results and ensure BC even during the migrations.“

Cement wanted to build around an infrastructure that would allow them to scale with future business expansion while maximizing the utility of their hardware, and by creating an IT infrastructure built around Red Hat on Power Systems, Cement has laid a foundation that positions them to capitalize on the expanding hybrid cloud capabilities from IBM Power Systems and Red Hat, such as:

• Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Power Virtual Server – Recognizing that Red Hat OpenShift can be a critical part in helping organizations build an agile hybrid cloud, the container platform is available on Power Virtual Server leveraging OpenShift’s baremetal installer ⁽ⁱ⁾. The Power Virtual Server is an enterprise Infrastructure-as-a-Service offering built around POWER9 and offering access to over 200 IBM Cloud services. In addition, Power Virtual Server clients can run business applications like SAP HANA in an IBM POWER9-based cloud.

• Red Hat Runtimes on Power Systems – To help organizations and developers create cloud-native applications, Red Hat Runtimes is supported on Power Systems. It is a set of products, tools and components designed to develop and maintain cloud-native applications. Now, developers looking to create cloud-native applications on Power Systems have access to leading open source frameworks and runtimes that provide a single development experience for hybrid applications spanning Power Systems and other platforms.

• Red Hat Ansible Content Collections – Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, made available on Power Systems last year, provides an open source platform for simpler automation of common IT tasks, freeing up IT administrator time as well as compute resources to focus on other tasks. IBM has created an extensive set of Ansible modules for the Power Systems user community. Since the start of the new year, Power Systems added 22 Ansible modules to the Collection that bring new automation capabilities for common tasks like patch management, security management, OS and application deployment, continuous delivery, centralized backup and recovery, and virtualization management and provisioning. Currently, there are 102 Ansible modules, downloaded more than 13,000 times since February 23, that support POWER available to the open source community on GitHub. Many of these same modules are available as production-ready, enterprise-hardened and certified Ansible Collections via Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform. ^(iv)

Simplified deployment and management of hybrid cloud
To help clients not only deploy a hybrid cloud, but also scale with agility to respond to spikes in demand, the company is announcing two technologies designed to bring simplicity to hybrid cloud deployment and management:

• Power Private Cloud Rack solution – A pre-configured on-premises system with compute, storage, networking and pre-installed software, like OpenShift, to match an organization’s existing infrastructure, be it based around Linux, IBM i, or AIX, to help organizations operationalize their cloud management and provide an IaaS environment to help clients accelerate development and operations for Kubernetes container-based cloud-native applications with OpenShift Container Platform.

• Cloud-like capacity and pricing across hybrid cloud – The company had already enabled flexible, elastic capacity for on-premises Power Private Cloud with Dynamic Capacity, allowing those users to unlock additional compute cores as needed and get cloud-like consumption-based pricing. Now, the firm is extending that ability to the hybrid cloud by piloting hybrid capacity credits, which can be purchased and used to unlock capacity on select on-premises Power9-based servers as well as Power Virtual Servers, based on where the user needs the additional compute power. The company is also working with other ecosystem partners to further extend dynamic capacity across multiple Linux distributions.

“IBM’s latest expanded support of their hybrid cloud and application modernization initiatives will help enable our customers to easily attain the efficiencies and flexibility of combining on-premises and cloud solutions using the latest open source and tooling,” said Jim Dixon, VP, software and IBM Power systems, Mainline Information Systems. “Availability of hybrid cloud credits along with new appliance-like options of hardware and Red Hat software, including Red Hat OpenShift to provide consistency between on-premises IBM Power Systems and off-premises clouds, can offer ease of entry into this new and important IT paradigm.“

IT infrastructure continues to evolve for hybrid cloud
Later this year, the next gen of the Power Systems servers based on Power10 processor, which was built from the ground up for hybrid cloud, will debut. In addition, later this year the next gen for the AIX OS, version 7.3, is expected to continue the legacy of innovation with enhanced capabilities that deliver the resiliency, security, and scale needed for the hybrid cloud.

To round out a hybrid cloud ready infrastructure, IBM Storage recently announced entry-level FlashSystem models with container support as well as support for OpenShift and Ansible Automation Platform, while IBM Z and Power Systems also announced hybrid cloud container offerings for IBM Z across OpenShift and IBM Cloud Paks.

Statements regarding company‘s future direction and intent are subject to change or withdrawal without notice, and represent goals and objectives only.

(i) – Red Hat Knowledge Base article, Deploying OpenShift 4.x on non-tested platforms using the bare metal install method –
(ii) – This is an IBM internal study designed to replicate multi-tier banking OLTP workload usage in the marketplace of an IBM E950 (40-core Model 9040-MR9) with a total of 1TB memory extrapolated (based on IDC QPI performance metric) to 60 cores running on three nodes of IBM S922 (20-core Model 9009-22G) with a total of 768GB memory. The OpenShift cluster consisted of three master nodes and two worker nodes using OpenShift version 4.5.5 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux CoreOS (RHCOS) for IBM Power across five PowerVM LPARs. A sixth PowerVM LPAR on the system ran the OpenShift load balancer. SMT8 mode was enabled across all Power LPARs. Results are based on an extrapolation to three servers from an an x86 cluster configuration comprised of 2 servers running VMware ESXi 6.7 with 8 VM guests (three masters, 4 workers, and 1 load balancer) using OpenShift version 4.5.6. Each worker node guest had access to all vCPUs on the physical server on which it was running. Compared x86 models for the cluster were 2-socket Cascade Lake servers containing 48 cores and 512GB each for a total of 96 cores and 1TB of memory. Both environments used JMeter to drive maximum throughput vs. 4 OLTP workload instances using a total of 500 JMeter threads. The results were obtained under laboratory conditions, not in an actual customer environment. IBM’s internal workload studies are not benchmark applications. Prices, where applicable, are based on US prices as of February 15, 2021 from website and x86 hardware pricing is based on IBM analysis of US prices as of October 20, 2020 from IDC. Price comparison is based on a 3-year TCO including HW, SW, networking, floor space, people, energy/cooling costs and 3 years of service and support for production and non-production (dev, test and HA) environments.
(iii) – Based on IBM internal, cross-industry assessment.
(iv) – Number of downloads does not represent number of unique users