Accelerating Modernization on IBM Power with Open Source Software and CI/CD Tooling

Much as Linux and open source transformed how operating systems were developed, open source software (OSS) is transforming the way applications are developed. Clients and ISVs (Independent Software Vendors) are increasingly embracing OSS. According to the 2021 Red Hat State of Enterprise Open Source report, 90% of IT leaders are using enterprise open source. At IBM, OSS forms the foundation for our Red Hat synergy, Cloud Paks, and the ISV enablement that Power customers can rely on as they accelerate the modernization of their mission critical workloads.

To stay competitive, customers are embarking on workload and infrastructure modernization which is designed to help their enterprise systems keep pace with today’s speed of business. We see that many of these customers are shifting to an open hybrid cloud and are adopting flexible tools for a modern DevOps environment. Architecture-independent developer tools can simplify developer workflows while increasing collaboration, productivity, and visibility by unifying enterprise-wide DevOps regardless of the underlying platform.

With the GitLab Ultimate 14.3 release, IBM Power customers can gain a modern DevOps platform, delivering an end-to-end solution for collaboration, visibility, and development. The GitLab Runner, and its operator, available via the OpenShift Operator Hub with support for Power expected at the end of October, extends GitLab’s multi-architecture CI/CD capabilities and native build and validation of high value workloads to IBM Power.

Nima Badiey, VP of Alliances at GitLab shared that “GitLab, the DevOps platform, is designed to accelerate deployment of critical workloads on IBM Power and Red Hat OpenShift. As businesses look to accelerate their digital transformation initiatives with hybrid and multi-cloud deployments, our customers can leverage the latest GitLab 14.3 release including the GitLab Runner for IBM Power and the new Power10 processor, to develop, secure, and operate software in a single application which can lead to faster pipeline performance and increased collaboration between developers and security teams.”

To further integrate Git repositories into Kubernetes deployment paradigms, OpenShift offers fully supported CI/CD with OpenShift Pipelines, based on OSS Tekton. OpenShift Pipelines is fully integrated with GitLab to deliver a seamless experience for both ISVs and end customers. Other tooling ISVs focused on CI/CD include Travis-CI and Jenkins. Jenkins is used by developers mostly as a continuous integration engine but also facilitates continuous build and deployment and infrastructure deployment. In keeping with the open source spirit, OpenShift Pipelines can be used as an alternative to or alongside Jenkins deployments. Jenkins and Tekton are both Continuous Delivery Foundation Projects.

Travis-CI, who announced support for Power9 in 2019, is a continuous integration platform for building, testing, and deploying open source software, and it supports open source projects that are hosted on GitHub, GitLab, and Bitbucket. Travis CI is designed to make it simple to run a build against multiple CPU architectures with the addition of one additional line in the configuration file.

Choosing the right tooling solution influences DevOps flexibility, maturity, automation and transformation to help customers develop and deploy applications to the cloud environment of their choosing. Along with our ISVs like GitLab, IBM Power and Red Hat OpenShift can help customers and ISVs accelerate their modernization journeys by adopting tooling designed to support important missions, likean accelerated time to market through the continuous delivery of an automated and efficient CI/CD pipeline.

Source: ibm.com

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Accelerate application development with Red Hat and IBM Z

How can you accelerate the development and deployment of applications, and then manage them at scale?

This is the challenge businesses are facing around the world in the era of hybrid cloud – including organizations who depend on IBM Z or LinuxONE for their IT infrastructure and are looking to modernize their applications in place.

Back in August, we discussed Red Hat OpenShift’s great momentum on IBM Z and LinuxONE. And the recent announcement of Red Hat OpenShift 4.9 is an excellent opportunity to reflect on what’s been happening in the Red Hat OpenShift ecosystem for IBM Z and LinuxONE over the past few months. An ecosystem that includes not only Red Hat and IBM software, but a wide range of open-source projects and ISV applications.

Next steps

Red Hat OpenShift continues to expand and gain new features. One of the most interesting developments in OpenShift is its transformation from just x86 to multi-architecture diversity. This includes IBM Z and LinuxONE, but also Arm and IBM Power which are increasingly important for the emerging edge computing market as well as the cloud and datacenter.

Red Hat OpenShift 4.9 for IBM Z and LinuxONE includes support for multiple network interface cards (Multi-NIC) which can improve performance internally and externally, provide separation of networks, and enhance the fail-over capability.

One of the strengths of IBM Z and LinuxONE is advanced security features, with the IBM Crypto Express card providing fast hardware cryptography, as well as protecting keys in a Hardware Security Module. Red Hat OpenShift support for the Crypto Express card is planned to be provided through a Red Hat certified container, available later this year. The unique combination of Red Hat OpenShift plus the IBM Z cryptographic hardware creates a highly differentiated, security-rich solution.

Data and AI

The latest version of IBM Cloud Pak for Data on IBM Z and LinuxONE, available from October, includes IBM Watson Studio. This enables machine learning models to be built and deployed on IBM Z and LinuxONE. Introducing artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities to OpenShift applications on Z and LinuxONE is a major step forward and can help organizations to reduce fraud and unlock the value of their data.

Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundation for IBM Z and LinuxONE 4.8, available from September, provides persistent storage and other data services such as object storage, dynamic provisioning, disconnected install, and DASD support for cloud-native mission-critical workloads on IBM Z and LinuxONE.

Integration

IBM Cloud Pak for Integration has been updated to the latest version (2021.3.1) and includes updated support for IBM Z and LinuxONE.  Building on Red Hat OpenShift, this enables applications to connect asynchronously using technologies such as IBM MQ and MQ Advanced, Platform Navigator, App Connect, Aspera High Speed Transfer Server, and the Kafka-based Event Streams.

Management

As OpenShift workloads on Z and LinuxONE scale, the need increases for management tools which can also scale.

Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes has been able to manage clusters and containers on IBM Z in “manage-to” mode since version 2.2 – meaning that the management console would run on an x86 system. Now with Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management 2.4 (aligned with Red Hat OpenShift 4.9) the management console can run on IBM Z as well, adding “manage-from” mode. This helps enable seamless hybrid cloud management, with Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management on IBM Z managing OpenShift clusters running on x86, IBM Power, and public cloud infrastructures, as well as on IBM Z.

Complementing this, IBM Cloud Pak for Multi Cloud Management provides a consistent management experience across multiple clouds for managing virtual machines and enabling cloud automation on IBM Z and LinuxONE in “manage-to” mode.

Instana, IBM’s recent acquisition for discoverability and management of applications, now supports IBM Z and provides Observability from Mobile to Enterprise. Instana can monitor OpenShift applications running on IBM Z or LinuxONE, also in “manage-to” mode.

Finally, IBM Cloud Infrastructure Center, which manages the IBM Z and LinuxONE infrastructure for both traditional and cloud workloads, can now use IBM Spectrum Scale for block storage provisioning, as well as introducing fabric zoning support for IBM z/VM virtual machines.

Ecosystem

The ecosystem of Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) and application providers supporting Red Hat OpenShift running on IBM Z and LinuxONE continues to expand.

This includes Temenos, who announced the availability earlier this year of their next-generation core banking solution, Temenos Transact, on OpenShift on IBM Z and LinuxONE. By combining Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Z and LinuxONE, banks can deliver new services to their customers while leveraging existing infrastructure.

Several other solution partners applications are also enabled on Red Hat OpenShift for IBM Z and LinuxONE, including:

◉ Core banking applications such as Technisys and Infosys Finacle

◉ Digital banking engagement applications including Backbase

◉ Relationship-based pricing and product applications such as Zafin and SunTec Xelerate

◉ Payments applications including Vestigo and Fiorano

◉ Database management applications such as Fujitsu Enterprise Postgres

Source: ibm.com

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Get a health check for your SAP HANA on IBM Power Systems

We all know that seeing a doctor for regular checkups is important. Even if you aren’t having any problems, it’s always a good idea for your physical health. In some ways, a “health check” for your SAP HANA on IBM Power Systems is similar. You may be getting optimal availability and performance, but a regular review is very important.

Read More: C2070-981: IBM FileNet Content Manager V5.2

IBM Power Systems technology for HANA has numerous advantages such as flexibility, efficient resource utilization, server consolidation, performance and reduction in cost. An SAP-certified person is required to install and configure HANA using the tailored data center integration (TDI) model. During deployment, a certified HANA engineer sets up the system following IBM Power server and SAP HANA best practices as per SAP notes and runs the SAP HANA Hardware and Cloud Measurement Tool (HCMT). This ensures the environment has been configured for HANA prerequisites and for hardware performance to meet HANA key performance indicators (KPIs).

After deployment, however, organizations will eventually need to make changes to their workloads and infrastructure. The monitoring tools you use might not capture deviations from best practices. Some components of your system might require periodic checks like firmware updates, patches, backups, cluster operations and so on.

The need thus arises for a periodic health check for SAP HANA on Power Systems. Without periodic health checks, you might not be getting the best availability and performance from your systems, and you could be at greater risk for an unplanned outage.

What is an SAP HANA on Power Systems health check?

A health check involves inspecting your system in several key areas. These include:

◉ Ensuring up-to-date software levels

◉ Examining the adequacy of hardware resources

◉ Looking at system tuning based on your current workload pattern

◉ Doing checks for best practices in virtualization

◉ Checking for security hardening implementation as per your company security policy

◉ Checking the feasibility of adopting newly released features in the Power server/OS/HANA

Your HANA configuration, error logs, high availability and backup policies are also validated.

Minimum checks that need to be carried out as a part of SAP HANA on Power Systems health check

Here is a list of the minimum checks that must be covered as a part of SAP HANA on Power Systems health check. This is only a high-level list. You might need additional checks based on your results.

1. Physical hardware installation checks

◉ PCI adapter placement and memory dual inline memory module (DIMM) placement

◉ Active/inactive core/memory distributions

◉ Check for working links (link up status) for network and host bus adapters (HBAs)

2. Software-level checks

◉ Check to see the support of all installed software levels and their compatibility

3. Availability and redundancy checks

◉ “Working” redundancy at all levels such as I/O adapters, switches, storage, LPARs, frames and so on

◉ Business expectation of recovery point objective (RPO), recovery time objective (RTO) and infrastructure readiness to meet these numbers

4. Operating system configuration checks

◉ Checks to confirm OS installation as per best practices and as per SAP notes for SAP HANA on Power systems

◉ Checks to see security hardening implementation

5. LPAR/Frame-level resource utilization checks and performance

◉ Processor, memory, disk and network utilization and comparison with available capacity

◉ Check to see the tunable values associated with processor, memory, disk I/O and network I/O are optimal for the current load

6. HANA checks

◉ HANA file system checks

◉ Review of HCMT results

◉ HANA configuration verification

◉ HANA backup checks

◉ HANA resource utilization checks

Benefits of a HANA system health check

An SAP HANA on Power Systems health check offers numerous benefits:

◉ Identify any single point of failure and fix it

◉ Prepare you for handling unexpected downtime, if any

◉ Demonstrate current hardware utilization and growth trends, thus helping you plan for future growth or release a portion of your hardware for other workloads, saving on budget for any additional workloads

◉ Get better support by staying up to date with software versions

◉ Better manage your IT budget by knowing growth trends

◉ Identify new technologies that could be applied to your environment

◉ Improve productivity, security and confidence. May reduce the cost of acquiring additional hardware for new workloads

Who can perform an SAP HANA on Power Systems health check?

Anyone who has good knowledge of IBM Power Systems, Linux and HANA can do an SAP HANA on Power Systems health check. You could do it yourself or engage a team of experienced consultants such as IBM Systems Lab Services. Lab Services helps organizations build and optimize SAP HANA solutions with Linux on Power Systems with a tailored data center infrastructure strategy. Health checks are among the many services we offer to help clients optimize their SAP HANA environments.

Source: ibm.com

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How to get the most value from SAP HANA

3 ways running SAP HANA on Power Systems can benefit your business

Increasing disruption creates increased complexity and a need to solve problems quickly—as in yesterday. The last year forced businesses to take a quantum leap in the acceleration of, and focus on, digital transformation. We all saw entire industries go completely online overnight, and companies that had started modernizing their businesses were in a better position to adapt quickly, while many struggled to maintain business continuity. What’s clear is today’s customer preferences and appetite for exceptional digital experiences is demanding, and the success of every business relies on the ability to adapt as the needs of customers continue to evolve.

More Info: C2090-543: IBM DB2 9.7 Application Development

Core business applications, such as SAP HANA, are key to ensuring your organization can keep up with the speed of change; the time to embrace migration and modernization is now. By using SAP business applications, IT teams can simplify workflows, speed processes, and reduce business risk, thus freeing up time and resources to focus on their move to SAP S/4HANA.

Why should running SAP HANA on Power Systems matter to you?

In the simplest terms, SAP HANA is a platform that can efficiently and cost-effectively process data faster than any traditional database. It can help your organization process information that is coming from, including but not limited to, the business, mobile, UX/UI, and the Internet of Things (IoT), efficiently and cost effectively. Notably, SAP HANA facilitates analytics and data processes as well as application development and deployment.

Furthermore, SAP HANA’s in-memory database can be run on-premises, on an IBM Power® Systems server, in the cloud, or both, and can be an integral part of your hybrid cloud strategy. It’s worth mentioning Power Systems is built precisely for memory-intensive applications, such as SAP HANA, offering the resilience, scale, and performance you’ll need to ease the process and still quickly deploy your applications.

Three scenarios where the benefits of SAP HANA on IBM Power Systems are undeniable

So, how can SAP HANA on IBM Power Systems benefit your business? Here are three questions and answers to help you get the most value out of SAP HANA and achieve your broader business goals.

Scenario 1: My SAP HANA application is due for a refresh. What do I stand to gain by updating my SAP HANA application?

If you’re running SAP HANA appliances on architecture that needs a refresh or are in the process of a strategic hybrid cloud transformation, upgrading to SAP HANA on Power Systems can help you reduce data sprawl, increase flexibility, improve reliability, boost performance and consolidate fewer workloads in a smaller footprint.

In fact, even if you’ve never had IBM Power Systems in your data center, establishing the platform will provide you with a powerful Linux system offering significant processor benefits and positions you to develop a customized solution for your business needs.

Scenario 2: I’m running a traditional database or other non-SAP HANA processing solution. Why should I make the costly and challenging move to SAP HANA from a traditional database?

SAP is discontinuing support for the SAP Business Suite with traditional databases in 2027, creating a mandatory move to SAP HANA. By maintaining traditional SAP deployments, you’re consuming IT resources that could be better diverted to more strategic initiatives. Migrating to SAP HANA on IBM Power Systems will significantly boost your performance, ease data administration and processing and increase user response time for transactional in-memory processing.

IBM Power Systems is an important part of this process because, as an in-memory database, SAP HANA performs best with high-quality memory and large memory spaces. With Power Systems you can easily shift resources from your traditional environment to a growing SAP HANA portfolio.

Scenario 3: I have on-premises SAP applications. Can I expand to off premises?

Absolutely! In fact, as customers develop their hybrid cloud strategies—and, simultaneously, SAP discontinues support for SAP Business Suite—there’s even more urgency to develop and execute on a migration plan toward SAP S/4HANA. Fortunately, you can easily extend your SAP environment to our IBM Power Virtual Servers. Power Virtual Servers provide a wide variety of SAP-certified options for running SAP workloads. One use case we see is customers utilizing Power Virtual Servers for non-production/test environments, freeing up on-premises infrastructure to optimize their production SAP workloads.

How to get the most out of SAP HANA on IBM Power Systems

SAP HANA can be complex, but the benefits of running SAP HANA on Power Systems are compelling—you can reliably process and analyze your data-intensive workloads with minimal delays, improved performance, faster load times and a lower overall cost.

If you’re curious and want more information, the IDC white paper, Who Can Benefit from SAP HANA Database and S/4HANA on IBM Power Systems? outlines the benefits of SAP HANA on IBM Power Systems, including deployment options, performance and cloud capabilities. Click below to learn more about how your organization can realize the benefits of SAP HANA on Power.

Source: ibm.com

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3 critical responsibilities of digital asset custodians

Blockchain technology is moving beyond experimentations and use in payments. Recent advances in cryptographic, security and distributed ledger techniques have opened the door to the widespread use of decentralized ledgers to create sovereign currencies, stablecoins, digital securities and other types of tokenized contracts.

At Hex Trust we provide an enterprise platform which allows financial institutions to use blockchain to integrate digital assets into their business operations in a highly secured, scalable and compliant solution.

While we agree with market estimates that widespread implementation could still be several years away, Hex Trust believes that the size of the digital assets market could reach US$ 10 trillion by 2023, causing a big shift in the overall structure of financial markets. Banks and other financial intermediaries will soon be forced to devise and implement new digital asset strategies.

Custodians: the foundation of a successful digital asset solution

The role of custodians will be a critical building block for the new financial markets infrastructure and will be necessary for the widespread adoption of digital assets. We believe there are three critical responsibilities for digital asset custodians: safekeeping, connectivity and compliance.

Safekeeping

Securely custodizing digital assets protects the private keys and develops secure workflows to support transactions in and out of custody (deposits and withdrawals). So far, custodians have relied on cold wallets created and managed in air-gapped environments to provide the clients with an acceptable level of security. Conversely, most hacks have concentrated on hot wallets, used to provide clients with quick access to their assets. Multi-signature wallets and wallets based on threshold algorithms such as state space search (SSS) and  model predictive control (MPC) mitigate some of the risks of hot wallets. In addition to storage of the private keys, custodians must build their technology architectures to manage cybersecurity risks when interfacing with a public blockchain to facilitate transfers of these assets.

As the blockchain market becomes institutional, the current wallet implementations will not be scalable enough to cater to the requirements of financial intermediaries. A new approach will be required to offer custody solutions which can scale and process thousands of transactions per second with the necessary levels of security.

Hex Trust’s custody platform, Hex Safe™, was specifically engineered leveraging IBM Hyper Protect Virtual Servers and IBM LinuxONE to enable trusted cryptographic transactions and to deliver the highest level of  security and scalability. In addition to a holistic protection compliant to FIPS (Federal Information Processing Standards) 197 and FIPS 140-2 Level 4 HSM (Hardware Security Module) standards, the IBM Z environment has memory enclaves with common criteria EAL (Evaluation Assurance Level) 5+ rated separation between partitions. Hex Safe integrates additional security measures to enhance the security of assets such as automatic encryption, hardware-bound signing, and immutable customized compliance workflows, protected by tamper-proof secure boot and Secure Image Build, defend the system from malware contamination or coding attacks.

Connectivity

At Hex Trust we believe that a key responsibility of digital asset custodians lies in simplifying the underlying complexities of blockchain technologies and creating a standard access layer to connect capital and service providers across the ecosystem. This is a critical building block to extract the maximum value that blockchain networks can offer to its users and an opportunity to design a new financial market structure fundamentally different from the current one.

Hex Trust is spearheading this transformation by providing its clients an open platform that can be used to securely store assets and to access services offered in the digital asset ecosystem, focusing on integrating brokers, prime brokers, exchanges, lending and borrowing platforms, staking solutions and other custodians.

In addition, Hex Trust is committed to providing a secure bridge between the traditional financial world and the new digital asset ecosystem, allowing banks and other traditional financial institutions to access and serve clients in the digital asset space. As an example of this effort, Hex Safe integrates a SWIFT (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication) interface to create a seamless communication channel with traditional financial institutions.

Compliance

Following the dramatic rise in cryptocurrency investments and trading activities over the last few years, regulators are setting their sights on this growing part of the financial services industry. An example of the regulatory interest is the new guidance published in June 2019 by the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) on how its 37 members should regulate cryptocurrency exchanges. Unlike regulated financial institutions, most cryptocurrency exchanges, and other digital asset operators, do not currently have a legal or technological framework to obtain, hold and transmit identifying information for their transaction counterparties. In addition, while there has been clear progress in various jurisdictions with respect to digital assets, service providers operating in different countries have different regulatory expectations with very limited global consensus on cross-border activities.

At Hex Trust, we believe that digital assets custodians will play a critical role in facilitating the adoption of regulatory and compliance frameworks in the industry. This role consists of various responsibilities including monitoring clients’ transactions to prevent AML/CTF (Anti-Money Laundering/Counter-Terrorism Financing) activities, reporting identified and transaction information to regulators, protecting clients’ data and providing clients and regulators with tools to perform their compliance activities.

Hex Safe has been specifically designed to meet the complex compliance requirements of our target clients — banks and other financial institutions. Examples of features include on-chain and off-chain account segregation, full audit trails, integrated AML/KYC (Anti-Money Laundering/Know Your Customer) tools to prove ownership and source of funds, and regulatory and internal reporting capabilities. Further, data privacy regulations can add additional levels of complexity, as custodians must be able to collect and transmit data without accessing and storing sensitive third-party data.

In line with our collaborative approach to the digital asset market, Hex Safe has already integrated third-party tools to enhance our blockchain analytics functionalities, with a long term objective of connecting various compliance platforms to satisfy the requirements of our clients and the jurisdictions they operate in.

Looking towards the future of the digital asset market

As blockchain technology and digital assets become mainstream, the role of the custodian is evolving from  simply providing a secure wallet to providing bank-grade security and transactional capability, securely connecting services and capital across the market, and ensuring compliance with relevant regulations and legislations in various jurisdictions. These responsibilities pose a complex challenge to invested entities and will ultimately define the future of the market infrastructure. Hex Trust, with IBM infrastructure, is well-positioned to lead the transformation in this area and offer digital assets players the first bank-grade solution to access the digital asset market.

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IBM and Verum Capital help businesses leverage blockchain

IBM and Verum Capital, a Swiss-based blockchain advisory boutique, are collaborating to help businesses accelerate the use of digital assets by scaling and securing blockchain solutions.

The rise of the digital economy

According to Research and Markets, the global digital asset management market is growing at 16.5 percent to reach $8.5 billion by 2025. In Switzerland, two banks are now fully licensed to offer blockchain-based financial instruments and traditional banks are increasingly offering crypto services. In the DACH region, more than 50 banks have applied for a license to offer similar services.

More and more, leading financial institutions are bringing traditional investment products onto blockchain. This shift toward decentralized finance is important for the future of the digital economy. By offering blockchain-based financial products, financial institutions can grow business through inclusion. At the individual level, blockchain-based services can support the unbanked but also the micro-investor who can gain access to the rate of return typically reserved for institutional investors with large sums of money. At the organizational level, financial products that are built using the blockchain become affordable and flexible enough to serve the SME segment. Now small businesses can also benefit from bond issuance on blockchain, for example.

Digitizing assets

Traditional company shares, bonds, loans or non-traditional and non-bankable assets such as artworks, real estate properties, private securities, even gold can be digitized, tokenized, and traded on a variety of platforms. An advantage of tokenizing assets is that it creates a fractional ownership scheme for physical assets that had previously been considered indivisible. The underlying asset could then be offered to a larger number of buyers who have increased liquidity on the secondary market. Tokenization allows the digital economy to become much more efficient, transparent, and liquid, while it also becomes a more inclusive marketplace.

Key success factors

Storing and trading digital assets securely using blockchain is a step forward in unleashing the transformative potential of the digital economy.

There are two key success factors for the widespread adoption of digital assets: hypercritical availability and scalability, as well as simultaneous industry-leading security.

Until now, this trade-off has presented a significant obstacle. Users had to choose between availability and security when handling their digital assets. IBM is solving this trade-off for financial services providers through cutting-edge digital asset custody that makes the location of the asset irrelevant (no matter where the asset is actually stored). The technology has incredible potential to improve digital asset availability without sacrificing security.

Verum Capital and IBM — strong synergies

IBM’s digital asset custody solutions are the basis for the collaboration with Verum Capital. Together, Verum Capital and IBM can offer clients highly secure and scalable digital asset infrastructure solutions, as well as the essential advisory services that will enable them to develop new business opportunities using blockchain.

As the leading blockchain advisory, Verum Capital is joining IBM’s unique ecosystem to ensure that these institutional-grade digital asset services can best be used in the financial services sector.

Since 1977, tens of trillions of dollars of wealth have been secured using hardware security modules (HSMs) invented by IBM. Featuring hardware security modules, IBM LinuxONE servers, for example, enable pervasive encryption of all application data in-flight and at-rest. They run IBM Hyper Protect Virtual Servers, a solution that provides a secure computing environment for highly sensitive data.

Once again, IBM is at the forefront of a technological solution for wealth storage and transaction, and together IBM and Verum Capital are the perfect fit for the positioning of this next generation technology.

Based on our extensive experience working on strategic blockchain projects within the financial sector,  we know how incredibly valuable it is for clients to have the choice to deploy a solution on-premises, as part of a private cloud environment, or as a service, allowing digital asset and blockchain firms to scale with the growing demand.

The essential infrastructure that IBM continues to develop is a very valuable building block for our team of blockchain consultants. When we advise our clients, develop pilot projects, and manage full-scale implementations of blockchain technology, we choose to work with IBM’s infrastructure and products because businesses are very comfortable relying on IBM.

Source: ibm.com

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IBM Z deepens data privacy capabilities with new air-cooled models and IBM Secure Execution for Linux

In September 2019, IBM announced IBM z15™, delivering industry-first data privacy capabilities with the ability to manage the privacy of customer data across hybrid multicloud environments and to scale from one to four frames. For our clients on their journeys to cloud, IBM z15™ and IBM LinuxONE III was a major step toward encrypting everywhere, cloud native development and IBM Z Instant Recovery–but we aren’t stopping there.

Announcing IBM z15 Model T02, IBM LinuxONE III Model LT2 and IBM Secure Execution for Linux

Every day, clients of all sizes are examining their hybrid IT environments, looking for flexibility, responsiveness and ways to cut costs to fuel their digital transformations. To help address these needs, today IBM is making two announcements. The first is two new single-frame, air-cooled platforms– IBM z15 Model T02 and IBM LinuxONE III Model LT2–designed to build on the capabilities of z15. The second, is IBM Secure Execution for Linux, a new offering designed to help protect from internal and external threats across the hybrid cloud. The platforms and offering will become generally available on May 15, 2020.

Expanding privacy with IBM Secure Execution for Linux

According to the Ponemon Institute’s 2020 Cost of an Insider Breach Report[1] sponsored by IBM, insider threats are steadily increasing. From 2016 to 2019, the average number of incidents involving employee or contractor negligence has increased from 10.5 to 14.5–and the average number of credential theft incidents per company has tripled over the past three years, from 1.0 to 3.2.[2] IBM Secure Execution for Linux helps to mitigate these concerns by enabling clients to isolate large numbers of workloads with granularity and at scale, within a trusted execution environment available on all members of the z15 and LinuxONE III families.

For clients with highly sensitive workloads such as cryptocurrency and blockchain services, keeping data secure is even more critical. That’s why IBM Secure Execution for Linux works by establishing secured enclaves that can scale to host these sensitive workloads and provide both enterprise-grade confidentiality and protection for sensitive and regulated data. For our clients, this is the latest step toward delivering a highly secure platform for mission-critical workloads.

For years, Vicom has worked with LinuxONE and Linux® on Z to solve clients’ business challenges as a reseller and integrator. On learning how IBM Secure Execution for Linux can help clients, Tom Amodio, President, Vicom Infinity said, “IBM’s Secure Execution, and the evolution of confidential computing on LinuxONE, give our clients the confidence they need to build and deploy secure hybrid clouds at scale.”

Simplifying your regulatory requirements for highly sensitive workloads

In addition to the growing risk of insider threats, our clients are also facing complexity around new compliance regulations such as GDPR and the California Consumer Privacy Act, demonstrating that workload isolation and separation of control are becoming even more important for companies of all sizes to ensure the integrity of each application and its data across platforms. IBM Secure Execution for Linux provides an alternative to air-gapped or separated dedicated hardware typically required for sensitive workloads.

Delivering cyber resiliency and flexible compute

Building on recent announcements around encrypting everywhere, cloud-native and IBM Z Instant Recovery capabilities, as well as support for Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform and Red Hat Ansible Certified Content for IBM Z, these two new members of the IBM Z and LinuxONE families bring new cyber resiliency and flexible compute capabilities to clients including:

◉ Enterprise Key Management Foundation–Web Edition provides centralized, secured management of keys for robust IBM z/OS® management.

◉ Flexible compute: Increased core and memory density with 2 central processor complex drawer design provides increased physical capacity and an enhanced high availability option. Clients can have up to 3 I/O drawers and can now support up to 40 crypto processors.

◉ Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 4.3: The latest release, planned for general availability this month on IBM Z and LinuxONE.

Complementary IBM Storage enhancements

In addition, IBM also announced new updates to our IBM Storage offerings for IBM Z. The IBM DS8900F all-flash array and IBM TS7700 virtual tape library both now offer smaller footprint options. This week the TS7700 family announced a smaller footprint, with flexible configurations for businesses of all sizes and different needs that can be mounted in an industry-standard 19-inch rack.

Source: ibm.com

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Address customer data privacy and protection concerns with encryption everywhere

Data privacy and protection remain top boardroom and C-suite issues. The data breach threat still looms large: 59 percent of businesses experienced a data breach caused by a vendor or third party in 2018. As organizations migrate workloads to hybrid multicloud environments, they must ensure that the data within these environments is effectively protected.

Consumers have grown more concerned with the privacy of their data — as have regulators. In 2019, many fines were levied related to GDPR and U.S. Federal Trade Commission regulations. High-profile corporate data breaches and misuses have increased consumer scrutiny of how corporations use and share their data. A new IBM and The Harris Poll study found that almost all consumer respondents (94 percent) agree that businesses should do more to protect their privacy.

These trends, along with recent regulations such as the EU GDPR, the upcoming California Consumer Privacy Act, and Thailand’s Personal Data Protection Act, indicate that the pendulum is swinging toward more privacy and protection of personal data.

In addition to protection, your customers now expect privacy and control of their data. How can you deliver this?

Expand data privacy and protection

Until now, in my experience, both organizations and solutions have typically focused on protecting data at the aggregate level — within entire databases or applications. Existing data-protection solutions tend to be siloed and focus on protecting only data within the IT infrastructure. But data does not stay in one place: it needs to move. The need to manage privacy across multiple disjointed solutions makes enforcing the appropriate use of data (data privacy) across an organization complex.

Pervasive encryption helps prevent data misuse from data breaches across your enterprise and keeps data within your direct control. Even if hackers breach the data, they would likely not be able to access it because it is encrypted.

Maintain privacy with IBM Data Privacy Passports

Pervasive encryption lets you encrypt all enterprise data, keeping it secured within your on-premises environment. But what about when the data leaves this environment? What about data on other platforms?

Much of your customers’ data lives in the public cloud and is shared with your business partners. Your customers want this data private and easy to control, yet instantly accessible. Consumer mandates for data privacy and protection wherever their data lives require the extension of enterprise-level security beyond your data center’s on-premises architecture. This requires data-centric audit and protection (DCAP): protecting information at the data level rather than broadly at the IT infrastructure level. Think of this level of protection as having encryption everywhere.

Introducing IBM Data Privacy Passports, exclusively for IBM z15™

IBM Data Privacy Passports, a leading-edge DCAP solution available in beta on the new IBM z15, empowers you to  build customer trust by keeping data private and secured wherever it goes.

With Data Privacy Passports, you control how data is shared and accessed. Now you can protect and provision data while revoking access to that data at any time, regardless of where the data is located. Data Privacy Passports extends encryption everywhere, enforcing data privacy by policy even when the data leaves your data center and extending IBM Z enterprise-class protection to data from other sources. It enables you to enforce the appropriate use of data across private, public and hybrid clouds at the data level. It does this all without impacting system performance.

A simple example demonstrates how Data Privacy Passports creates strong data privacy and protection for your customers. Consider an international bank that does business with a financial technology company. The bank sets rules governing the company’s use of the bank’s customer data through agreed-upon terms and conditions. Using Data Privacy Passports, it can enforce these rules and limit or revoke access to data as appropriate.

Keep data protected and private

Here’s a closer look at how Data Privacy Passports keeps data private and secured while simplifying compliance and data management.

◉ Protect data wherever it goes. Data does not stay in one place and typical solutions are often fragmented or siloed. Data Privacy Passports addresses this by introducing Trusted Data Objects (TDO), which provide data-centric protection that moves with the data–even with unauthorized copies.

◉ Ensure privacy with controlled data usage. Data Privacy Passports is designed to establish and enforce an enterprise-wide data privacy policy where different views of data are surfaced to different users based on their need to know. TDO technology can also be used to prevent collusion between data owners to use data inappropriately. It does this by breaking the referential integrity between data tables with different owners or limiting that connection based on policy.

◉ Track provenance and consumption of data. Track the data from point of origin to point of consumption, with a central point of auditing information for data access and aggregation for your compliance obligations. End-to-end tracking is achieved by encrypting the data as a Trusted Data Object, so it does not need to be tracked throughout its journey but only when opened with a passport controller. If a user whose access you have revoked tries to access the data through the passport controller, it fails and that fail is logged.

◉ Simplify data management with Embedded Key Management. Data Privacy Passports provides all required key management for TDOs created and distributed throughout your enterprise and beyond. This greatly reduces the complexity of implementing the solutions and provides simple management of data as it moves between systems and across hybrid multiclouds.

Source: ibm.com

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Announcing Red Hat Ansible Certified Content for IBM Z

We know that speed and agility are of utmost importance for our clients on their journey to cloud. But what we’ve also heard from them is that they’re looking for an enterprise-wide strategy to provide consistent automation across their hybrid environment — spanning their IT infrastructure, clouds and applications.

The reality of hybrid IT is here. Our clients are looking for solutions that leverage their investments in — and the strengths of — their existing IT infrastructure, clouds and applications in a seamless way. To deliver on this we’re focusing on three areas: developer experience, automation and operations that bring value to our clients no matter where they are on the hybrid IT continuum.

To help make this a reality, today IBM announced the availability of Red Hat Ansible Certified Content for IBM Z, enabling Ansible users to automate IBM Z applications and IT infrastructure. The Certified Content will be available in Automation Hub, with an upstream open source version offered on Ansible Galaxy. This means that no matter what mix of infrastructure our clients are working with, IBM is bringing automation for IBM Z into the fold to help you manage across your hybrid environment through a single control panel.

Ansible functionality for z/OS will empower IBM Z clients to simplify configuration and access of resources, leverage existing automation and streamline automation of operations using the same technology stack that they can use across their entire enterprise. Delivered as a fully supported enterprise-grade solution with Content Collections, Red Hat Ansible Certified Content for IBM Z provides easy to use automation building blocks that can accelerate the automation of z/OS and z/OS-based software. These initial core collections include connection plugins, action plugins, modules and a sample playbook to automate tasks for z/OS such as creating data sets, retrieving job output and submitting jobs.

Over the last several months, we’ve made significant strides to improve the developer experience by bringing DevOps and industry-standard tools like Git and Jenkins to the platform. We’ve announced IBM Z Open Editor, IBM Developer for z/OS V14.2.1, and, of course, we are a founding member of Zowe™.  In February we announced the availability of Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Z, which enables developers to run, build, manage and modernize cloud native workloads on their choice of architecture.

And with today’s announcement, we’re taking the next step toward this commitment.  For developers and operations, Ansible allows them to break down traditional internal and historical technology silos to centralize automation — all while leveraging the performance, scale, control and security provided by IBM Z. This brings the best of both worlds together with a practical and more economical solution. We’re excited about this important step both for our clients, and for our shared mission with Red Hat to provide a flexible, open and secured enterprise platform for mission-critical workloads.

Source: ibm.com

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What’s behind data preparation for AI?

Data is a fundamental element of AI. If you have no data, you won’t get any meaningful insights from the AI techniques out there. Luckily, we live in a world that generates tons of data every day, and storage has become so affordable that we can now put zillions of bytes of data to use with AI, right? Well, not quite. Having lots of data isn’t enough to help you play well in the AI game. You have to know how to work with it.

Consider this example: Imagine your company is doing market research for a global client in the consumer goods industry. The client wants to use AI to analyze trends in consumer behavior, and it has sales data on its products from supermarkets in many countries. However, you quickly run into a challenge: one product — say a detergent — can have a different brand name in almost every country. How can your AI model provide meaningful insights in such a situation?

This problem is just one example of a scenario in which data is not ready to be used, even though you have it. There are many other issues that might arise. For example:

◉ Data sources might be different; for instance, one market chain stores data in CSV format while others do it in Excel spreadsheets

◉ Different constants could mean the same thing; for instance, some sources could use M / F for gender while others use Male / Female

◉ Some sources might be missing some information that others collect; for instance, state and city

So, all of these are details you have to attend to when dealing with data. That’s why data preparation is so important before you can begin to analyze it through AI.

Data preparation

It’s known that 80 percent of the time of a data science project lifecycle is spent on data preparation. This is because a data scientist needs to clean the data before it’s used in an AI model.

The data preparation process may include: filling in missing values (but with what? a default value? something else?), removing duplicate entries, standardizing attributes (gender or product names, for instance), eventually masking sensitive data if required by law, and more. Additionally, deciding which part of the data should be used for training a model, which for testing, which for validating is also important (this is called data partitioning). Otherwise, your model will suffer from some issues during its training phase, as we’ll discuss in future blog posts.

Figure 1: The lifecycle of a data science project

Data scientists report that the task of data preparation is often tedious and error prone. It is, however, the most important step for ensuring more accurate insights from AI. If you teach children a false answer in school, they’ll give a false answer when they encounter a similar problem in real life. AI follows the same rationale. If an algorithm learns a wrong answer from incorrect, imprecise data, its insights will not be useful, and might even point in the wrong direction.

If I were to give you one hint about the AI game, it is to invest in data preparation!

Tools that can help

So, you might be wondering, are there tools to help data scientists prepare data? Of course! Tooling exists to help with performing data transformation, deduplication, filtering, aggregation, partitioning, visualization and more. IBM Watson Studio Local and IBM Cloud Pak for Data include tools to aid with data preparation. For example, an IBM POWER9 cluster can perform data preparation with Watson Studio Local, as well as training and inferencing with Watson Machine Learning Accelerator.

Whichever tools you decide to use, have some goals in mind:

◉ Automation of data preparation: Can the tool handle all required data operations?

◉ Ability to work with raw data that has never been formatted

◉ Scalability: Data sets can be very large, so your tool needs to handle that, especially in today’s world of a zillion bytes of data

◉ Collaboration across business units, because you don’t want to create more data silos

◉ Ease of use: How easily can this tool perform the operations you need and connect to the data sources you have?

◉ Use of new data sources for more current data to be prepared and used, thus allowing AI models to identify trending changes more quickly

◉ Interoperability with cloud solutions

Data preparation is by no means simple, and there are many more nuances to it than I described in this blog post. I hope, though, that this has helped you understand how important data preparation for AI is. In my next post, I’ll talk about model training.

Source: ibm.com

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To cloud or not to cloud . . . that shouldn’t be the question

n my discussions with clients about their journey to cloud, it’s becoming evident that many of them are viewing cloud as a goal, instead of looking at cloud deployments as a capability. In some cases, line-of-business owners are under corporate pressures to “adopt” a cloud-first strategy.

A recent Forrester Consulting study commissioned by IBM, “The Key To Enterprise Hybrid Multicloud Strategy” suggests that “75% [of 350 surveyed global decision makers] have received pushback while advocating for strategies outside of cloud environments.”  The result of this, unfortunately, is the lack of continued investment on their on-premises (“on-prem”) environments.

From my experience, this type of deployment focus may not yield the expected results. We shouldn’t think about problem solving as “To cloud or not to cloud?” Instead, we should ask ourselves, “What is the problem I’m trying to solve?” and “Are cloud deployments (public or private) going to optimize my solution?”

One of the key recommendations in the Forrester Consulting study is to “invest in cloud using a strategy that aligns to your context.” I couldn’t agree with this more. So, let me offer an example of context:

Problem: My mission-critical workloads need a disaster-recovery solution to ensure I can get access to my data in a reliable manner, should the need arise. Proverbially, I don’t want to put all my eggs in one basket. I also don’t have the capacity to keep a second copy of all this data on premises.

Solution: Disaster recovery is one use-case that could warrant a good use for public cloud. In such a scenario, data residing primarily on premises could be tiered to the cloud for backup storage, with near real-time mirroring to the on-premises environment to help provide data consistency.

Hybrid workflow: To design and optimize such a solution, you need software which has been designed for a hybrid use case. Designed for means the software provides the same, consistent management interface you’re used to running in your existing on-premises environment and in the public cloud.  Furthermore, this allows you to have a cohesive view of your solution, regardless of the deployment model.

Defining chapter 2 in the journey to cloud

Forrester’s research clearly determines that “organizations that can bring together on-premises with public cloud strategically will be best positioned for operational excellence.” At IBM, we refer to this more complex combination of on premises and cloud as Chapter 2. In order to understand this better, let’s look at the components of the journey:

Born on the cloud – These are cloud-natively built applications and services that use cloud infrastructure tools and microservices to run the application.

Lift and shift – Applications which were originally designed and written to run on premises are now ported to run on cloud infrastructure. In many situations, while this may get the “ticky box” of cloud deployment, you may not see the true operational and scale value of this approach.

Refactored (modernized)– Applications which were originally designed for on-premises consumption and rewritten using cloud microservices architectures or were perhaps located in a containerized environment. Your app may not be born on the cloud, but it’ll act like it was!

Regardless of where you are on your journey to cloud, I’d encourage keeping an eye on your on-premises infrastructure. And by journey, I mean crawl (lift and shift), walk (modernize), and run (hybrid workflows).

Be prudent in your on-premises investment, with an eye towards hybrid!

Nurturing your on-premises environment is critical for long-term sustainable strategy, but it also protects your prior investments. The smarter way to think about cloud is to focus optimization of your environment aligned with your specific use cases. Future-proof your on-premises investments by ensuring they are designed with a hybrid workflow in mind. Does that mean all workflows are hybrid? Not at all. Remember, context (also known as use case) is key!

Here at IBM Storage, we recognize the challenges you face and have equipped the IBM FlashSystem family with software that provides you with an onramp to the cloud. A great example of this is IBM Spectrum Virtualize, an award-winning software foundation that provides simplified storage across heterogeneous environments. With Spectrum Virtualize on premises and IBM Spectrum Virtualize for Public Cloud, you can have a single cloud solution for your storage needs, rather than a siloed approach with different solutions for different vendors.

Furthermore, the beauty of it is that you can further optimize your hybrid workflow by leveraging software like AI-infused IBM Storage Insights, to monitor your data, regardless of where your data resides, on premises or in the cloud!

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Three ways to intelligently scale your IT systems

Digital transformation, with its new paradigms, presents new challenges to your IT infrastructure. To stay ahead of competitors, your organization must launch innovations and release upgrades in cycles measured in weeks if not days, while boldly embracing efficiency practices such as DevOps. Success in this environment requires an enterprise IT environment that is scalable and agile – able to swiftly accommodate growing and shifting business needs.

As an IT manager, you constantly face the challenge of scaling your systems. How can you quickly meet growing and fluctuating resource demands while remaining efficient, cost-effective and secure? Here are three ways to meet the systems scalability challenge head-on.

1. Know when to scale up instead of out

If you’re like many IT managers, this scenario may sound familiar. You run your systems of record on a distributed x86 architecture. You’re adding servers at a steady rate as usage of applications, storage and bandwidth steadily increases. As your data center fills up with servers, you contemplate how to accommodate further expansion. As your IT footprint grows and you can’t avoid increasing server sprawl despite using virtualization, you wonder if there’s a more efficient solution.

There often is. IBM studies have found that once many workloads reach a certain threshold of processing cores in their data center, it often becomes more cost efficient to scale up instead of out. Hundreds of workloads, running on 50 or so processing cores each, require significant hardware, storage space and staffing resources; these requirements create draining costs and inefficiencies. Such a configuration causes not only server sprawl across the data center, but sprawl at the rack level as racks fill with servers.

By consolidating your sprawling x86 architecture into a single server or a handful of scale-up servers, you can reduce total cost of ownership, simplify operations and free up valuable data center space. A mix of virtual scale-up and scale-out capabilities, in effect allowing for diagonal scaling, will enable your workloads to flexibly respond to business demand.

IBM studies have found, and clients who have embraced these studies have proven, that moving from a scale-out to a scale-up architecture can save enterprises up to 50 percent on server costs over a three-year period. As your system needs continue to grow, a scale-up enterprise server will expand with them while running at extremely high utilization rates and meeting all service-level agreements. Eventually a scale-up server will need to scale out too, but not before providing ample extra capacity for growth.

 2. Think strategically about scalability

In the IT systems world, scalability is often thought of primarily in terms of processing power. As enterprise resource demands increase, you scale your processing capabilities, typically through either the scale-out or scale-up model.

Scalability for enterprises, however, is much broader than adding servers. For instance, your operations and IT leaders are always driving toward increased efficiency by scaling processes and workloads across the enterprise. And your CSO may want to scale the encryption used to protect the most sensitive data to all systems of record data. As your systems scale, every aspect must scale with it, from service-level agreements to networking resources to data replication and management to the IT staff required to operate and administer those additional systems. Don’t forget about the need to decommission resources, whether physical or virtual, as you outgrow them. Your IT systems should enable these aspects of scalability as well. Considering scalability in the strategic business sense will help you determine IT solutions that meet the needs of all enterprise stakeholders.

3. Meet scale demands with agile enterprise computing

An enterprise computing platform can drive efficiency and cost savings by helping you scale up instead of out. Yet the platform’s scalability and agility benefits go well beyond this. Research by Solitaire Interglobal Limited (SIL) has found that enterprise computing platforms provide superior agility to distributed architectures. New applications or systems can be deployed nearly three times faster on enterprise computing platforms than on competing platforms. This nimbleness allows you to stay ahead of competitors by more quickly launching innovations and upgrades. Also notably, enterprise platforms are 7.41 times more resilient than competing platforms. This means that these platforms can more effectively cope when resource demands drastically change.

Techcombank, a leading bank in Vietnam, has used an enterprise computing platform to meet scalability needs. As the Vietnamese banking industry grows rapidly, Techcombank is growing with it – with 30 percent more customers and 70 percent more online traffic annually. To support rapid business growth, Techcombank migrated its systems to an enterprise computing platform. The platform enables Techcombank to scale as demand grows while experiencing enhanced performance, reliability and security.

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Top IBM Power Systems myths: Linux on x/86 is different from Linux on Power

There are many misconceptions about IBM Power Systems in the marketplace today, and this blog series is all about dispelling some of the top myths. In the last post, I put aside the myth that IBM Power Systems has no cloud strategy. In this post, we’ll look at a myth that has been propagated by many of our x/86-based competitors and consultants. This myth wants you to believe that if you invest in a Linux on IBM Power Systems solution, you’ll be getting an inferior product, one that’s not “real” Linux, or that your applications won’t work the way they should.

There is one aspect of this myth that’s true. Linux on Power solutions are:

◈ Almost always faster
◈ More reliable
◈ Usually smaller (require fewer cores and fewer physical systems)
◈ More secure

In all other aspects, from Linux distributions and release levels to system management and monitoring tools and development environments, they are the same.

Consider the following points:

Endianness

Not long ago, there was a difference between Power and x/86 based systems that affected not only Linux distributions but all operating systems, applications and databases that ran on those systems. Our industry borrowed from Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, using the terms “big endian” and “little endian” to describe the way computers represent data. x/86 systems have always been “little endian” and Power was always “big endian.” That caused a problem because software created for little endian systems could not run on big endian systems without modification, and vice versa.

In April 2104, IBM announced little endian (LE) support for POWER8, and today all of our POWER9 systems support a 64-bit LE environment.

While LE support removes the endian differences, LE code compiled for an x/86 system needs to be recompiled for a Power-based LE system.

Linux distributions

There are hundreds of Linux-based distributions available in the market today. While many can run on IBM Power Systems, IBM officially supports RedHat Enterprise Linux, Ubuntu and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. Community versions of Linux like Debian, openSUSE, CentOS, Fedora and others are also available.

These distributions are built around a package management system and include the Linux kernel, Gnu shell utilities, system management tools, a desktop environment as well as open source software and sometimes proprietary packages.

There are Linux distributions with features designed to take advantage of some of the unique capabilities of IBM Power Systems architecture, and the startup process for a Linux distribution may be a bit different between x/86 and Power. However, once it is installed the features and functionality are identical.

Virtualization options

There are usually several options for virtualization within a Linux distribution. KVM is the default option for Ubuntu and is the foundation for Red Hat virtualization. PowerVM is the only virtualization option for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 at this time. KVM on Power and RHEV options provide the same functionality on Power as they do on an x/86 platform, while PowerVM is designed to take advantage of IBM Power architecture.

System administration and monitoring tools

All Linux distributions supported on IBM Power platforms provide system administration and monitoring tools. Cockpit, Performance Co-Pilot (PCP) and NMAP are examples of the tools provided by Red Hat. SUSE Linux Enterprise server supplies an advanced system management module that includes CFEngine, Puppet, Salt and The Machinery Tool. Landscape is Ubuntu’s systems management package.

There are many open source and proprietary solutions available like Chef, JuJu, Ansible, Wireshark and countless others that can be added to a Linux distribution. In fact, the top five open source tools for Linux systems administration are available on Power Linux systems providing the same level of functionality and support as they do for x/86 based systems.

Application development environments

Linux on Power solutions have all of the tools developers need to build their application portfolios. For example:

◈ Container management solutions like Docker, Kubernetes and Rancher

◈ Programming languages including Python, php, Ruby, Scala, Java, Erlang and C/C++

◈ Atom, Bluefish, Eclipse, Netbeans, Geany, AnJuta and Glade—all considered to be the top integrated development environments

◈ Git/Git-Hub, Apache Subversion, Darcs, Mercurial, Monotone and CVS—some of the best version control systems available

◈ Eight of the top ten text editors, including Atom, VIM, gedit, GNU EMACS and Nano

◈ Many other capabilities, including diff tools like meld and kdiff, debug tools and multi-media editors like Adrour, Audacity and Gimp

Desktop environments and application portfolios

There are also a wealth of open source and proprietary applications, databases and desktop options available for Power Systems clients to choose from. Here are a few examples:

◈ KDE, Mate, GNOME, Cinnamon, Budgie, LXDE and XFCE, which are considered to be the top desktop environments in 2018 for Linux

◈ Thunderbird, Geary and Evolution e-mail clients

◈ Pidgin and Empathy instant messaging applications

◈ Calligra Suite, Libre Office and WPS Office

◈ MariaDB, Postgre SQL, EnterpriseDB, MongoDB, Cassandra, Redis are among the top open source databases available, as well as IBM Db2

◈ Dolibarr and Odoo, two of the most popular open source ERP packages

◈ Spark, elasticsearch, Apache Solr and Hadoop for analytics

◈ SAP HANA’s more than 2000 clients, many of whom left the x/86 world to take advantage of the IBM Power architecture

Is Linux on x/86 different from Linux on Power?

Linux on Power is the same as Linux on x/86, except for better performance, reliability, security and a smaller physical footprint. These are the differences that should matter most and be the key reasons why a Linux on Power solution is a better choice than an x/86-based Linux solution.

IBM Systems Lab Services has a team of experienced consultants ready to help you get the most out of your Linux on Power system.

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Get a health check for your SAP HANA on IBM Power Systems

Are you confident your SAP HANA on IBM Power Systems are getting optimal performance?

SAP HANA has been available on IBM Power Systems for a few years, and many organizations have migrated to it, bringing numerous advantages such as flexibility, efficient resource utilization, server consolidation and reduction in costs. As a Tailored Data Center Integration (TDI) model, an SAP-certified person is required to install and configure HANA. During deployment, a certified HANA engineer sets up the system following IBM Power server and SAP HANA best practices and runs an SAP HANA Hardware Configuration Check Tool (HWCCT), which ensures the environment has been configured for HANA prerequisites and for hardware performance to meet HANA KPIs.

After deployment, however, organizations will eventually need to make changes to their workloads and infrastructure. The monitoring tools you use might not capture deviations from best practices. Some components of your system might require periodic checks like firmware updates, patches, backups, cluster operations and so on. Hence the need arises for a periodic health check for SAP HANA on Power Systems. Without periodic health checks, you might not be getting the best availability and performance from your systems, and you could be at greater risk for an unplanned outage.

What is an SAP HANA on Power Systems health check?

A health check involves inspecting your system in several key areas, such as:

◈ Ensuring up-to-date software levels
◈ Examining the adequacy of hardware resources
◈ Looking at system tuning based on your current workload pattern
◈ Doing checks for best practices in virtualization
◈ Checking the feasibility of adopting newly released features in the Power server/OS/HANA

Your HANA configuration, error logs, high availability and backup policies are also validated.

Minimum checks that needs to be carried out as a part of an SAP HANA on Power Systems health check

The following chart shows a list of the minimum checks that must be covered as a part of an SAP HANA on Power Systems health check. This is only a high-level list; additional checks based on your results may be needed.

Benefits of an SAP HANA system health check

An SAP HANA on Power Systems health check offers numerous benefits:

◈ Helps you identify any single point of failure and fix it

◈ Helps prepare you for handling unexpected downtime

◈ Demonstrates current hardware utilization and growth trends, thus helping you plan for future growth or release a portion of your hardware for other workloads, thus saving on budget for any additional workloads

◈ Helps you get better support by staying up-to-date with software versions

◈ Helps you better manage your IT budget by knowing growth trends

◈ Helps you know new technologies that could be applied to your environment

◈ Improves productivity, improves your confidence and may reduce the cost of acquiring additional hardware for new workloads

Who can perform an SAP HANA on Power Systems health check?

An SAP HANA on Power Systems health check can be done by anyone who has good knowledge of IBM Power Systems, Linux and HANA. You may do it yourself or engage a team of experienced consultants like IBM Systems Lab Services. Lab Services helps organizations build and optimize SAP HANA solutions with Linux on Power Systems with a tailored data center infrastructure strategy, and health checks are among the many services we offer to help clients optimize their SAP HANA environments.

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