IBM Power Systems Gain Combined On-Prem/Off-Prem IaaS for Hybrid Cloud

 By Jean S. Bozman

IBM is bringing a hybrid-cloud IaaS solution to the global IBM Power server base. IBM Power systems have been available for customers’ on-prem systems with an IaaS off-prem option since 2019. However, this is the first time that an IaaS option is available for both on-prem and off-prem flexible deployments.

The news, as announced on Oct. 8, allows customers to run Power applications on-prem, or on the IBM Cloud – or on both environments. In some cases, on-prem sites will be preferred by customers, especially those in regulated industries, due to security and compliance issues. Others will choose the flexibility of running Power workloads on-prem or off-prem, depending on their organization’s business uses and security policies.

The official name for this IaaS solution is IBM PowerVS Private Cloud, for virtual servers running IBM AIX, IBM i and/or Linux applications. Power servers already had a PowerVS (Virtual Server) environment, supporting consolidation of multiple AIX, Linux and IBM i installations. The move will become even more important as customers expand their AI workloads – which will rely on “patterns in the data” to generate actionable business insights. This gained importance with the announcement of IBM's new Granite 3.0 LLM on Oct. 21.

Managing Mixed Environments in the Hybrid Cloud

Flexibility is an integral part of the IaaS offer, given the options and choices it presents to IBM Power customer sites. Based on the IaaS terms, PowerVS applications will run on the IBM Cloud or on customers’ premises (on-prem), depending on security and availability requirements for each workload. This means that customers can elect to change the placement of applications on the IBM Cloud or on the customer site.

It’s important to note that this IaaS offer will not be available for deployment on non-IBM public clouds (e.g., Amazon AWS, Google Cloud or Microsoft Azure). That makes it an all-IBM solution for customer workloads, no matter where they run, and no matter how they have been managed up-to-now.

Customers who sign three-year or five-year contracts with IBM will see a fixed minimum commitment with metering of compute, storage, memory for their combined cloud and on-prem placements. The IaaS contract for will include the named IBM PowerVS workloads over the 3-year or 5-year contract period.

Gaining Flexibility in IBM PowerVS Deployments

This news has broad implications for the IBM Power installed base, still estimated to top 100,000 servers operated by tens of thousands of IBM customers worldwide. Many longtime customers have workloads that now run in one or more data-centers that must be maintained separately, driving up power/cooling and maintenance costs. IBM Power systems run enterprise, HPC and AI workloads.

Examples of important IBM Power workloads include enterprise applications such as SAP and many industry-specific applications, and important production databases like Oracle, IBM DB2 and Linux/Postgres databases that support important business workloads –  running on Power for years. The IaaS offer will cover new applications, as well, that will be running in a PowerVS environment, including net-new applications assigned to PowerVS.

Addressing the Phenomenon of Workload "Repatriation"

The offer also addresses cases of application “repatriation,” where applications are returning from the public cloud to on-prem clouds. For those repatriated workloads, IBM is taking on the management tasks of updating software and ensuring high-availability operations. This supports the repatriation, if preferred by customers, while containing their maintenance costs, which are fixed in three-year and five-year contracts with IBM.

Customers migrating enterprise applications to the Cloud – including public cloud or private cloud locations – will gain more flexibility in deployments. The workloads can run off-prem or on-prem – and they can be switched at some later time from the customer’s enterprise datacenter to the IBM Cloud.

Beyond that, they will benefit from IBM-managed applications, reducing business-unit concerns about finding people who have Power skillsets and expertise who can come to work in their locations.

Consolidation of workloads is another benefit, based on PowerVS support for multiple operating systems and, therefore, multiple workloads. Now, customers can move some applications to an on-prem private cloud, managed by IBM, or to an off-prem public cloud (IBM Cloud).

The IaaS Approach

Taking an IaaS approach gives customers more options to migrate enterprise applications and data – and to operate them with unified management, reducing administrative and modernization costs. IBM has offered Storage-as-a-service (STaaS), but this is the first time that on-site premises infrastructure as-a-service (IaaS) options are coming to the IBM Power server.

Consolidation of workloads is a strong role for Power servers, which have a deep history that began years ago. IBM Power systems can host multiple operating systems – IBM AIX (Unix), IBM i (from IBM AS/400s) and Linux software, leveraging virtualization technology that has long been a strength of IBM systems, dating back to the 1990s and 2000s.

Customers know that costs on older servers rise as the servers age. Maintaining production environments requiring RAS features, HA, security patching and business continuity can also rise, over time, especially if they are running mission-critical enterprise applications. We must note here that this is important for SMB customers – a substantial portion of the historic Power installed base, who rely on IBM Power to run the production workloads that sustain their business and government organizations.

Administrative costs and operational costs are both being addressed by the IBM PowerVS offer. Customers will choose a 3-year or a 5-year contract for agreed-upon IaaS costs during the contract period. IBM sees this as an option that will allow customers to contain CapEX costs for physical infrastructure and OpEX costs for maintaining the running the applications on public and/or private Power infrastructure.

Workload Consolidation

Consolidation of environments is an important aspect of running Power servers, gaining importance in recent years. As noted above, IBM Power already had a PowerVS (Virtual Server) environment, supporting consolidation of multiple AIX, Linux and i installations.

Now, those customer options for deployment and management have expanded.  Customers will be able to move enterprise, HPC and mission-critical workloads to the PowerVS infrastructure (compute, storage and networking) that can best support them 

In some cases, this new IaaS offer will result in further consolidation of Power workloads within a customer’s enterprise data centers. In others, it will accelerate the pace of enterprise cloud migrations to the IBM public cloud or to a new enterprise cloud environment – or to a mix of both public and private hosted on PowerVS infrastructure.

The AI Opportunity

The IBM PowerVS offer can be seen as an important option for business customers who are expanding their AI capabilities. For those customers, AI will “tap” many databases across their enterprise to find the “patterns in the data” that will lead to actionable insights for transforming the company. For SMBs, this represents a new opportunity to reallocate applications across their IT landscape, consolidating footprints as they go.

Data is key to AI – whether for training models or for inference based on those models. PowerVS customers can now leverage the IaaS offer for their outreach to databases, some of which may have been isolated because they ran in another location. In this way, Power servers can become “hubs” in an AI strategy, because of their role in consolidating applications and data that can be leveraged from one widely accessible virtualized framework.

IBM’s Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) Deliverable

IBM’s IaaS offer brings a group of key business-value benefits to longtime IBM Power server and PowerVS customers, including:

·      Automated migration of IBM Power server applications and data.

·      Option to mix cloud and on-prem Power server environments.

·      Flexibility to move workloads between cloud and on-prem locations.

·      IBM management of IBM PowerVS addresses skill-set challenges at sites that have few in-house Power server administrators.

·      Support for new application development using Red Hat OpenShift software for orchestration of virtualized and containerized applications.

·      Support for Power servers running on POWER9, POWER10, including future versions of the IBM-designed POWER processors.

Summing Up: Hybrid Cloud and Power Servers

The new IaaS offer fits with IBM's corporate strategies for hybrid cloud (HC) and AI – pairing with both, which were both announced as top initiatives four years ago, when IBM CEO Arvind Krishna took office in April, 2020.

Clearly, the company has stayed the course of a HC-and-AI strategy for the last four years – and is making both hybrid cloud and AI key aspects of its overall IBM company-wide outreach to its enterprise customers.

Here, IaaS is being viewed as a cost-efficiency element for the enterprise – which today faces high labor costs for experienced system admins and experts in high-availability, business continuity and security for regulated industries (e.g., financial, pharma, oil/gas/energy and others).

IBM is building on its historic installed base of Power servers, and it is looking to support even more workloads for its enterprise and SMB customers. Importantly, IBM is offering to take the responsibility for deploying, maintaining and managing Power server infrastructure, including ongoing responsibility for ensuring RAS) – addressing an important customer priority to update and maintain consolidated workloads.

This is no small thing, given the incidence of cyberattacks, ransomware, power/cooling costs and operational outages that affect large enterprises and SMB sites, including federal, state and governmental agencies). These attacks interrupt business processes, impacting revenues and profits wherever they occur. Cyberattacks also impact employee productivity and business processes.

For global entities and SMBs, the costs of compliance with security and ESG requirements are growing each year. Significantly, IBM is now offering to assume those costs as an included deliverable, as an integral part of its IBM PowerVS IaaS contract agreements. By focusing on IT consolidation for customers’ applications and associated data, IBM is again emphasizing its role as a trusted partner for vital business applications that require high availability, security and support for business continuity.

Copyright 2024, Jean S. Bozman, All Rights Reserved