IBM Business Partners, MSPs, and ISVs amplify growth with IBM Power Systems Virtual Server

To achieve our mission of helping enterprises across the globe succeed through innovation, our team works alongside IBM® Business Partners within our valued, growing ecosystem.

Our network consists of IBM Business Partner companies, independent software vendors (ISVs), managed service providers (MSPs), global system integrators (GSIs) and other integral organizations that share our goals. Together, our Business Partners have achieved new levels of growth themselves through innovative products, including our latest IBM Power® offering, IBM Power Systems Virtual Server.

In this third installment of our blog series about IBM Power Systems Virtual Server, we’re looking at real-world examples of how growth is possible through scalable and transformative software hosting and management solutions.

IBM Power Systems Virtual Servers at a glance

Our team is thrilled about the impact our new hybrid cloud solution is already making for our Business Partners. We’ve combined the reliability and sheer processing power of on-premises Power servers with the scalability and flexibility that comes with a hybrid cloud environment. The result enables end-users to appreciate true hybrid cloud solutions that are strategically designed to be a seamless extension of their on-premises Power servers and IBM Power Systems Virtual Server data centers. IBM Power Systems Virtual Server is designed to deliver low-latency capacities thanks to 14 data centers in 7 countries with more on the way. They can run IBM AIX®, IBM i and Linux® workloads, including SAP SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 12 and 15 Open Virtualization Alliance (OVA) boot images and Red Hat® Enterprise Linux 8.1 and 8.2.

ISVs and IBM Power Systems Virtual Server

Let’s look at some examples of how ISVs are currently using IBM Power Systems Virtual Servers to promote innovation, transformation and peace of mind.

Created as a global solution

While Iptor has over 1,000 clients across the globe, its data centers were only in Denmark. Its goal was not only to globalize its operations, but also to automate and streamline its process. The worldwide data centers of IBM Power Systems Virtual Servers helped Iptor maximize uptime, while its image capture feature helped them better meet the needs of clients quickly and in a more efficient way. Finally, our DevOps pipeline helped make installation and upgrades universally accessible so customers on its supply chain could stay up to date.

A security-rich environment for sensitive data

Silverlake, a provider of a software-as-a-service (SaaS) digital banking cloud platform, joined our ecosystem to support IBM Cloud® for Financial Services™. Our collaboration allowed Silverlake to create scalable and security-rich virtual digital banking solutions in the highly regulated financial industry. Silverlake uses IBM Power Systems Virtual Server as an efficient and effective way to virtualize its solutions while meeting compliances and lowering risk.

Sandbox capabilities

Many of our ISVs that are already part of the IBM Power Systems ecosystem have found success by conducting proof of concepts (PoCs) in IBM Power Systems Virtual Server data centers. These vendors have containerized their applications, while also running demo versions of their application in a client-accessible sandbox. With this structure in place, prospects can try out applications in an isolated environment. This offering is designed to help improve security and uptime while helping environments meet spikes in traffic.

MSPs, Business Partners and IBM Power Systems Virtual Server

It’s always vital for MSPs, resellers and business partners to grow and discover new opportunities and revenue paths. IBM Power Systems Virtual Server is an excellent way to extend Power Systems offerings in a hybrid cloud environment for current and new customers while being supported and covered by the IBM brand. Moreover, we take infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) management responsibilities from our MSPs and take care of it ourselves, including maintenance, data center floor space, updates and the costs of running a data center. Handling the maintenance of infrastructure helps not only cut costs by taking away data center expenses, but it also helps increase revenue margins and maximize uptime and availability.

As an IBM partner, you now have the opportunity to build partner-driven solutions on top of IBM Power Systems Virtual Server. We work alongside MSPs looking to grow in the enterprise space and shift their focus on services, such as disaster recovery (DR), migration, end-to-end management or reselling the offering. IBM Power Systems Virtual Server helps the clients of our Business Partners reach new geographies — regardless of their location — to further achieve globalization. Clients also have quicker access to new Power Systems features and functions.

At the end of the day, it’s all about making a better experience for the end-user. Plus, being the only on-premises and off-premises certified Power solution for SAP HANA and SAP NetWeaver platform workloads, IBM can help enterprises meet the deadline to migrate to SAP S/4 HANA by 2027.

◉ Success through collaboration

A leader in hosting and managed services, Connectria has years of demonstrated and recognized experience serving IBM i customers. Connectria is now offering IBM Power Systems Virtual Server solutions to both its install base and new prospects after seeing strong demand for such a virtualized Power solution.

The Connectria team was excited to work with us, embracing opportunities to access a new market of high-end P30-tier licensing clients, as well as several other IBM i software tiers. We provided a variety of managed services and licensing specifically tailored to Connectria’s goals, growth objectives and current offerings. Now, Connectria is proud to offer our hybrid cloud infrastructure portfolio solutions bundled together alongside its management solutions. Connectria is also extending and shifting current clients’ infrastructure, including older on-premises Power Systems, to IBM Power Systems Virtual Server. As a result, Connectria clients can stay modernized by staying virtual.

Driven by the benefits of this latest offering combined with competitive pricing, Connectria’s sales team is proposing Power System Virtual Server solutions worldwide. Clients can now experience a new level of performance, experience and peace of mind.

A look at our roadmap

We are always pushing to add new capacities and capabilities to IBM Power Systems Virtual Server. In addition to upgrading our storage to IBM FlashSystem® 9200, here’s a high-level look at what end-users are finding beneficial. We’ve recently implemented virtual private network as a service (VPNaaS) solutions into this offering, as well as new network automation features. Coming soon is a whole new way to manage your IBM Power Systems Virtual Server, with IBM Cloud credit management. This credit system creates a simplified and efficient way for you to get the most out of your virtualized solution.

Source: ibm.com

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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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IBM Power Ecosystem reacts to Power10 launch

As we continue our focus on the critical role IBM Power ISVs play in supporting the Power 10 launch, I would like to highlight innovations with ISVs that go beyond performance optimization to how we are extending capabilities around AIX solutions with OpenShift on Red Hat, enabling IBM Power as a platform for mission critical data management solutions, and driving continued competitive advantages with ISVs for our AIX and IBM i clients.

Application modernization

Any application modernization effort requires a strong ecosystem of software to provide developers the ability to leverage new innovations and position their business to realize efficiency and flexibility gains.

Read More: C1000-004: IBM Cúram SPM V7.X Application Developer

Finacle customers have long relied on IBM Power to run their mission-critical core banking workloads. As banks face pressure from demanding customers and competition from fintechs, they are innovating to handle an increased demand for digital banking and more personalized services. Finacle Digital Engagement Hub provides customers who have long relied on Finacle Core Banking on AIX with a system of engagement with analytics-driven customer experiences across channels, applications, and devices. The Digital Engagement Hub is a cloud-native workload deployed with Red Hat OpenShift and can be delivered on the same infrastructure as the core banking workload, allowing for a highly flexible solution offering with very low latency.

Kelly Switt, senior director of Financial Services Industry Strategy, Ecosystem and Strategic Partnerships at Red Hat explained that, “We predict the future of digital banking will be built on the ability of FSIs to innovate at scale while retaining stable and reliable operations. Red Hat OpenShift running on Power10 can provide a production-ready, cloud-native foundation that fosters innovative offerings like Finacle Digital Engagement Hub, supporting banks and financial institutions in driving the next-generation of personalized services without impacting operational stability.”

Power10 based systems provide a solid foundation for application modernization. The consolidation and dynamic scaling capabilities enable customers to run systems of record side by side with Red Hat OpenShift based applications, allowing for a highly agile and flexible experience. Power10 is designed to allow customers to incrementally modernize by extending the value of existing applications on AIX, IBM i and Linux while starting to surround them with new cloud-native apps at their own rate and pace. Customers are able to leverage existing investments while also reaping the innovation, technology and economic benefits of the Power platform as the technology stack is modernized.

Mission-critical data management

Customers have utilized IBM Power for over 25 years with mission critical databases. The introduction of Power10 builds on the industry leading reliability of IBM Power, ranked most reliable for 12 years by ITIC, with the delivery of innovations like Open Memory Interface and inter-node SMP fabric.

Reliability is incredibly important as customers begin evaluating the modernization of existing systems of record to open source databases (OSDBs) like PostgreSQL and MongoDB. On database modernization, Eric Cargol, VP NA Commercial Sales and Global IBM Alliance at EnterpriseDB expressed how “Customers are increasingly using PostgreSQL as their database of choice to accelerate innovation and meet business objectives. EDB’s enterprise-grade PostgreSQL, coupled with IBM Power’s top ranked reliability and investment in hybrid cloud, makes Power10 a great option for flexible and scalable growth of EDB environments. We are aligned with IBM and committed to supporting our joint customers across their modernization journey.”

Leveraging enterprise distributions of popular OSDBs like PostgreSQL and MongoDB provide the support and tools needed for deploying mission-critical databases, whether they are new applications, re-platforming, or legacy database migrations. Undertaking the shift to commercial OSDBs with IBM Power and our ISVs minimizes the risks customers face with an extremely reliable system that maximizes availability and performance while minimizes outages.

IBM i ISVs excited for Power10

The IBM i operating system team has an incredibly strong customer base and ISV ecosystem. Current innovations focus on numerous areas, including application modernization, along with ongoing enhancements in Db2, RPG, and open source integration. The latest IBM i is designed to benefit from Power10 performance and throughput gains for single-threaded and multi-threaded workloads. Future work with Power10 and IBM i includes the exploration of on-chip compression and crypto accelerators. Ross Freeman, Product Manager and IBM Strategy Leader for IBM i partner, Infor, shared his excitement around Power10, “As a long-standing ISV of IBM Power, Infor is excited by the industry-leading innovation in the new Power10 systems. With thousands of clients running on IBM Power today we look forward to continuing our relationship with IBM and the benefits Power10 will bring to our mutual clients.”

AIX leveraging Power10 technology

The IBM Power team ensures that each operating system, AIX, IBM i, and Linux all take advantage of new Power10 functionalities. The AIX operating system team has a history of collaborating with ISVs for roadmap enhancements that help them optimize and build value around their solutions. This collaboration is demonstrated in the recently published IBM Power10 whitepaper. Other examples include enabling open source technology, performance and scale features, services for integrating with Power capabilities such as hardware acceleration of encryption and compression, and support for IBM’s next generation of advanced compilers with features for Power10 optimization and acceleration of machine learning and inferencing solutions.

Source: ibm.com

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Innovating with ISV partners

ISVs have always played a critical role in the value IBM Power delivers to customers. Through joint development and optimization with ISVs, IBM Power has continuously led the market in performance, scalability, and flexibility. As we launch Power10 we’re excited to highlight just some of the continued innovation with ISVs, going beyond performance optimization to how we are integrating AI, extending capabilities around Linux containers and Red Hat OpenShift, and teaming to further enhance security of one of the most secure platforms in the industry.

Jointly Innovating

The launch of the IBM Power E1080 system is only the beginning. We have a number of new innovations coming to Power10 on which we are partnering with ISVs such as SAP. Changbin Song, Vice President, SAP HANA & Analytics at SAP shared “SAP and IBM are working continuously on projects and technologies to benefit their joint customers. Together, SAP and IBM plan to look at new and improved capabilities brought by Power10 for its SAP HANA workloads.” 

In Core AI Inferencing and Machine Learning

The Power10 processor is designed to democratize AI across applications and operating environments, be it on Linux, AIX, IBM i, and across the entire Power10 family of servers. IBM Power users can now infuse AI directly into the core business applications and enterprise databases and run AI close to where the data resides. Our ISV partners can leverage this via four new Matrix Math Accelerator (MMA) units in each core. MMAs are alternatives to external accelerators for the execution of statistical machine learning and inferencing and are designed to reduce cost and provide a simplified solution stack for AI. IBM has optimized math libraries to enable AI tools to benefit from the acceleration provided by MMA units. The IBM Power E1080 has 5x faster AI inferencing per socket over the IBM Power E980 and, by supporting MMAs, ISVs can use the capabilities to help customers to speed up their applications and run high performance AI with security and efficiency.

Accelerating business decisions with Red Hat

IBM and Red Hat have extended their synergy around Red Hat OpenShift and Power10 to accelerate business insights with the infusion of AI into applications and data stores with the new Power10 MMA engines. This is designed to eliminate specialized systems or attached accelerators, to lower the total cost of ownership. In addition, IBM has enabled greater efficiency in cloud-native workloads with the ability to have 4X more containerized throughput per core running Red Hat OpenShift applications than compared x86.

End-to-end cloud-native security

Securing your data is more important today than ever before with the high threat of cyber-attacks. Power10 is architected for security, leveraging accelerated encryption across the stack so that data is available only to people authorized via encryption keys. To help support our customers’ modernization effort, IBM has teamed with Aqua Security, a pure-play cloud-native security provider that builds on our strong, secured Power10 base. Amir Jerbi, Co-founder and CTO at Aqua Security, shared that “IBM customers are shifting to hybrid cloud environments to help address operating costs and increase automation, but in doing so they also demand security and compliance. Aqua plays a key role and provides a further layer of cloud native security to support this transformation. We are proud to be one of the first security providers to help IBM and their customers achieve the potential of cloud native applications.” For more details on our relationship, check out Aqua’s press release and video. Partnering with Aqua gives our customers the ability to securely deploy cloud-native Red Hat OpenShift solutions on IBM Power.

Getting Started with Power10

We understand that many of our customers may not upgrade their software and hardware concurrently. These customers can take advantage of the ability to run in Power9 compatibility mode, designed to enable them to modernize software environment at their own pace.

IBM Power has a long history of partnership and co-creation with ISVs, providing support such as complementary access for development and testing on the latest equipment and collaboration with technical professionals. Whenever we have a new server release, as with Power10, we encourage ISVs to work with their IBM contact to be nominated for early access to hardware through our Early Support Program. ISVs can learn more about the support and programs available through the ISV Resource Center.

Source: ibm.com

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Announcing IBM Power E1080: engineered for agility

Organizations around the world are navigating constant and rapid changes to their operations and customer demand. They want IT infrastructure to help them be agile and flexible, efficient, and cyber resilient. It should help them to predict marketplace changes and respond at near real-time. While this requires their data to transform into value quickly, the security of sensitive data remains a key concern with increased ransomware and malware attacks. As organizations modernize their infrastructure, IBM is addressing these requirements with the new IBM Power E1080, the first in a generation of servers based on the Power10 processor.

IBM Power E1080 is engineered for agility. It supports IT modernization with a frictionless hybrid cloud experience. Here is how it is designed to deliver on the key enterprise needs:

Respond faster to business demands

Power E1080 delivers scalability and efficiency.

◉ World record SAP SD-two tier benchmark with 8 sockets that beats the best 16 socket results of x86 environment

◉ 2.5X performance per core than x86 Xeon Platinum

What if you can get this performance with a lower energy footprint? With the revolutionary 7nm Power10 processor, workloads that run on a Power E980 will consume 33% lower energy when run on the Power E1080.

IBM Power10 generation of servers is designed to make technology consumption a frictionless experience. With Hybrid Cloud Credits, enterprises can procure pay-per-use capacity that can be deployed across Power Private Cloud and Power Virtual Server co-located with IBM Cloud. The architectural consistency across these environments gives the flexibility to deploy where you want and when you want without requiring additional middleware or application re-factoring.

Protect data from core to cloud

With data residing in an increasingly distributed environment, you cannot set a perimeter to it anymore. This reinforces the need for layered security across IT stack. Power10 family of servers introduces a new layer of defense with transparent memory encryption. All data in memory remains encrypted when in transit between memory and processor. Since this capability is enabled at the silicon level, there is no additional management setup and performance impact. Power10 also includes 4X more crypto engines in every core compared to Power9 to accelerate encryption performance across the stack. For example, the widely used AES encryption performance is improved by 2.5X over Power E980.

With these innovations along with new in-core defense for Return-Oriented Programming attacks and support for Post Quantum Encryption and Fully Homomorphic Encryption, IBM Power E1080 makes the server platform family that is among the most secure even better.

Streamline insights and automation

As more AI models are deployed in production, the challenges around the AI infrastructure are coming to the fore. The typical AI deployment involves sending data from an operational platform to a GPU system. This usually induces latency and may even increase security risks with more data in network. Power10 addresses this challenge with in-core AI inferencing and machine learning. The Matrix Math Accelerator (MMA) in Power10 core provides the computational strength (at multiple levels of precision) and data bandwidth to tackle demanding AI inferencing and machine learning. Power E1080 delivers 5X faster AI inferencing per socket over Power E980.

Maximize reliability and availability

Power has been leading the industry in infrastructure reliability with 25% lower downtime vs. comparable high-end server. With Power E1080 we are making the most reliable server platform in its class even better with advanced recovery, diagnostic capabilities, and Open Memory Interface (OMI) attached advance memory DIMMs. The continuous operations of today’s in-memory systems depend on memory reliability because of their large memory footprint. Power10 DIMMs deliver 2X better memory reliability and availability than industry standard DIMMs.

As enterprises continue to modernize their business, the solutions of our ISV ecosystem partners will take advantage of these innovative and essential capabilities in IBM Power E1080. They will continue to help customers get more from their mission-critical workloads running on Power.

This is a critical time for IT infrastructure. Companies need agility, security, insights and reliability to ensure continuous operations. IBM Power is engineered for times like these.

Source: ibm.com

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Keeping your IBM Power Systems highly available

We’ve all heard of the “blue screen of death.” It’s the dreaded crash on a Windows-based computer. The potential loss of everything. If you’ve had the misfortune of seeing one, you know how upsetting it is. To put it mildly, it’s not fun.

Read More: C2150-609: IBM Security Access Manager V9.0 Deployment

An operating system crash of any kind leaves application users dead in the water. So avoiding single points of failure (SPOF) is a high priority. The UNIX® operating system is a potential SPOF, and this is true of all UNIX based operating systems including versions such as AIX®, HP-UX, iOS and all Linux flavors such as Ubuntu, RHEL, Android and SUSE.

IBM’s solution

Fortunately, thirty years ago IBM introduced high availability cluster multi-processing (HACMP) to combat this issue on its AIX RS/6000 systems. To state things in the simplest terms, two or more systems are paired in a cluster. When one system crashes, the other takes over. There is an application outage, but recovery is automated and downtime is primarily dependent on how long the applications themselves take to recover/restart. In the days without storage area networks, IP aliases or virtualized machines, HACMP/PowerHA® was a terrific way to go.

HACMP software is still widely used on the newest IBM Power Systems, having been renamed PowerHA SystemMirror®. But fourteen years ago, IBM introduced Live Partition Mobility (LPM). LPM gave users the ability to move fully virtualized AIX machines between physical hardware servers while the applications continued running. Ultimately, this is a game changer in high availability.

VM Recovery Manager High Availability (VMRMHA)

VMRMHA utilizes LPM simplified remote restart (SRR) technology for high availability. A user utilizing VMRMHA can set up an HA environment not just for selected virtual machines, but every virtual machine on an IBM Power® server. This includes Linux and IBM i virtual machines as well.

One drawback of using VMRMHA versus PowerHA is that with VMRMHA, the operating system must boot on a new physical server after an OS crash, and then the application restarts. In a PowerHA environment, only the application must restart. However, using VMRMHA has an advantage over PowerHA in that there are no “cluster of two AIX servers” that must be maintained or kept in sync.

To summarize:

No “cluster” to maintain.

– plus –

Only one AIX OS to maintain.

– plus –

Only one set of application code to maintain.

– multiplied by –

Number of PowerHA clusters

= equals =

Application High Availability is easier to maintain!

Converting existing PowerHA/HACMP clusters to a VMRMHA strategy is not a trivial task, but in the long term, it’s worth it because of reduced administrative overhead.

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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IBM Power Systems announces new hybrid cloud capabilities

Envision your data center a year from today. What has changed? Have you gained efficiency? Lowered costs? Increased agility and flexibility? These are just a few of the goals IBM Power Systems™ clients are focused on as they seek to integrate and extend their most mission-critical applications into hybrid cloud environments. The journey to hybrid cloud requires a variety of tools — not a one-size-fits-all approach — to successfully transform your operations.

Read More: C2150-606: IBM Security Guardium V10.0 Administration

Today we are announcing new capabilities available on the IBM Power Systems platform to help meet your business needs, no matter what point you are at in transforming your data center for the hybrid cloud era. You will have more options to leverage industry-leading scalability, reliability for VM based containerized applications and security built in at all layers from the processor to the OS. Clients can modernize their AIX®, IBM i and Linux® applications by deploying them in a hybrid cloud environment, automating common IT operations with Ansible, and co-locating containerized workloads with VM-based applications.

Unified enterprise hybrid cloud experience 

IBM Power Systems enables clients to move their mission-critical applications across hybrid cloud without refactoring or re-platforming. Now, we are adding more capabilities to provide a unified experience to acquire capacity in all Power®environments.

◉ IBM is extending that ability to hybrid cloud by piloting hybrid capacity credits, which can be purchased and used to unlock capacity on on-premises servers as well as on IBM Power Virtual Servers. IBM is also working with other ecosystem partners to further extend dynamic capacity across multiple Linux distributions.

◉ IBM is helping you to drive agility with new Ansible modules from Red Hat® Ansible® Certified Content for IBM Power Systems across your hybrid cloud deployments on AIX, IBM i and Linux environments. IBM Power Systems has added 22 new Ansible modules to the collection that bring new automation capabilities for common tasks like patch management, security management, OS & application deployment, continuous delivery, centralized backup and recovery, and virtualization management & provisioning, bringing the total number of POWER-supported Ansible modules to 102. Currently, there are 102 Ansible modules, downloaded more than 13,000 times since February 2021, that support POWER and are available to the open-source community on GitHub. Many of these same modules are available as production-ready, enterprise-hardened and certified Ansible Collections through the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform.”

Modernize existing applications

Now you are well into mapping out your hybrid cloud data center and looking to the future with new workloads. IBM Power Systems remains committed to supporting the modernization of your existing applications and building new cloud-native workloads required for transformation and business growth. With a robust 10+ year roadmap for AIX and IBM i, we are committed to delivering capabilities and solutions to help you meet today’s needs and prepare for future challenges.

◉ AIX 7.3 is coming to your data center in 2021. It will continue a 35-year tradition of innovation with enhanced capabilities that deliver resiliency, security and scale needed to get your IT environment ready for hybrid cloud.

◉ For clients who cannot upgrade currently or need more time to upgrade to IBM i 7.3, we are now supporting IBM i 7.1 on Power Systems Virtual Server co-located with IBM Cloud®.

Build new application services

IBM Power Systems continues to deliver modern capabilities to simplify the build of new cloud-native applications with OpenShift, which can be co-located with your existing AIX and IBM i applications.

◉ Simplify and accelerate private cloud deployments with the new IBM Power Systems Private Cloud Rack Solution. This is a pre-configured system with compute, storage, networking and pre-installed software to match an organization’s existing infrastructure, whether it is based around Linux, IBM i or AIX. It can help organizations operationalize their cloud management and provide an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) environment to help clients accelerate development and operations for Kubernetes container-based cloud-native applications with Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform.

◉ Expand into public cloud with Red Hat OpenShift® on Power Virtual Server leveraging OpenShift’s platform-agnostic installer. IBM Power Virtual Server is an enterprise IaaS offering built around IBM POWER9™, offering low-latency access to over 200 IBM Cloud services. In addition, IBM Power Virtual Server clients can now run leading business applications like SAP HANA in an IBM POWER9-based cloud.

◉ Red Hat Runtimes are now available on Power Systems, delivering a consistent development experience for applications that span across Power and other platforms.

Imagine your data center in 2022 and beyond. With our approach to continue delivering new capabilities, IBM Power Systems gives you the right infrastructure platform and co-optimized solutions to power your hybrid enterprise now and into the future!

Source: ibm.com

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8 reasons why IBM Power Systems is your app modernization foundation

Application modernization comes in many shapes and sizes, and it’s not always easy to know where to start. So, over the next few minutes, we’ll showcase the strengths and benefits that IBM Power Systems™ brings to your modernization efforts. Sure, there are many more benefits than we’ll cover here. For more in-depth analysis tips and recommendations to help you determine the complexity of your applications and a modernization path forward, you can check out our Field Guide to Application Modernization on IBM Power Systems.

Read More: C2150-606: IBM Security Guardium V10.0 Administration

Power Systems is built for core enterprise applications and for the next wave of digital transformation fueled by application modernization. Here are the major benefits of modernizing with IBM Power Systems:

1: Flexible, efficient utilization

You can manage spikes in demand and support more cloud workloads per server with IBM PowerVM® hypervisor on-demand CPU capacity. It manages demand by sharing pools of CPU cores across Red Hat® OpenShift® CoreOS nodes. These differentiating hypervisor constructs such as uncapped processors and shared processor pools provide the ability to guarantee performance SLAs while donating unused processor cycles to worker nodes in need of additional capacity. All this flexibility guarantees an 80 percent utilization on an IBM Power Systems E980 server.

2: More performance from software with fewer servers

You can buy fewer Power Systems servers to run an equivalent set of applications at comparable throughput levels than on competing platforms. That’s because it enables you to use 3.2X more containers per core with more CPU threads, achieve 2.6X better price performance (based on the number of containers), and collocate cloud-native apps with AIX, IBM i and Linux® virtual machine-based apps and enterprise data to exploit low-latency API connections to business-critical data. Plus, you can leverage sub-capacity licensing to greatly reduce containerized software license costs (IBM Cloud Pak Solutions, for example) using PowerVM shared processor pools, allowing CPU cores to be autonomously shared across Red Hat OpenShift worker nodes without sacrificing app performance.

3: Superior performance for your enterprise data

Running Red Hat OpenShift in a virtual machine adjacent to your AIX, IBM i or Linux virtual machines provides low-latency secure communication to your enterprise data with PowerVM Virtual I/O Server. This provides superior performance due to fewer network hops. It also allows for highly secure communication between your new cloud-native apps and your enterprise data stores as network traffic never has to leave the physical server.

4: Proven security and resiliency

To meet today’s security challenges, it’s essential that every layer of your company’s IT hardware and software stack remains secured. IBM Power Systems customers utilize the most reliable mainstream server platform to innovate and get to market faster without compromising security. Power Systems’ multi-layered approach to security gives you full visibility of your hardware and software. It protects the stack with comprehensive end-to-end security at every layer — including functionality that allows containers to remain secure, during and after deployment — all with a simple web-based UI.

5: Trusted and proven foundation

Kubernetes provides the core foundation for modernizing your enterprise applications. As the premier open-source container orchestration platform, it benefits both developers and IT administrators. Your developers have access to the latest software innovations to build software faster while your IT administrators can easily observe, operate and manage the platform and infrastructure. This helps you deliver high-value, high-quality software faster to end users. All of this is enabled through Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform.

6: Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform

Red Hat OpenShift is an enterprise-ready Kubernetes container platform with full-stack automated operations to manage hybrid multicloud deployments. Red Hat OpenShift is optimized to improve developer productivity and promote innovation; it is fully supported on all IBM Power Systems servers (IBM POWER8® processors or later).

7: IBM Cloud Pak solutions

Power Systems provides superior performance and economics for containerized workloads like IBM Cloud Pak enterprise-ready containerized software solutions for modernizing existing applications and developing new cloud-native apps that run on Red Hat OpenShift.

There are three main benefits: They are comprehensive and easy to use, they are supported by Red Hat and IBM, and they run anywhere Red Hat OpenShift runs. IBM Cloud Pak Solutions take a bundled approach that allows you to accelerate your modernization journey by packaging everything you need to get started — including Red Hat OpenShift and the apps that run on top of it. The IBM Cloud Pak solutions available on IBM Power Systems include IBM Cloud Pak for Applications, IBM Cloud Pak for Data and IBM Cloud Pak for Multicloud Management.

8: Innovate with an extensive container software ecosystem

At the heart of any application modernization effort is a strong software ecosystem that allows teams to innovate using the latest technologies. Now more than ever, open-source communities are playing a significant role in organizations’ modernization journeys. IBM Power Systems not only runs your core business applications, but also a wide range of popular open-source and commercial container software.

When you choose Power Systems to modernize, you choose industry-leading reliability, performance and security, as well as superior compute performance for data-intense and mission-critical applications. It is a foundation for modern container-based applications.

Source: ibm.com

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Lowering TCO with Linux on IBM Power Systems

Who could have predicted the success that Linux® would achieve when Linus Torvalds introduced its first release in 1991? Indeed, it could be argued that Linux has become the most popular operating system on the planet given that it runs on virtually every compute platform in use today. Its ubiquitous and portable nature enables organizations everywhere and of every size to leverage open standards and open-source community collaboration while exploiting architecture-specific attributes. Increasingly, organizations are choosing the IBM Power Systems™ platform over x86 to run their enterprise Linux workloads to gain dramatic IT cost savings.

Doing more with fewer cores

Both IBM® Power® processors and x86-based servers have made performance improvements over time. However, data from multiple sources show that while x86 servers may have increased in overall size, capacity, and system performance, the per-core performance of x86 multicore CPU offerings has remained relatively flat. In contrast, the IBM Power processor has increased its per-core performance by 35% on average with each new generation or technology release. For many Linux-based software packages, subscription and support licensing is typically priced per core (or socket). Reducing the number of required cores to run those packages can significantly decrease software costs. For a large European telecommunications company comparing Linux web application and database workloads on Skylake x86 blades and Linux on an IBM Power System E980 server, our analysis found that for every IBM POWER9™ core, the x86 solution required 10 Intel® Xeon Skylake cores. This core differential for the Power E980 solution would save the company $7 million over five years with 74% of this savings based on reductions in core-based licensing subscription and support costs for the systems software, web and database (Figure 1).

Figure 1

Floor space and electricity

Another advantage of Linux on Power and its capability to do more work with fewer resources is observed when examining space and electrical costs. A large genomics research facility was able to reduce its physical footprint from 89 Linux on x86 servers to four Linux on IBM Power System AC922 NVLink-enabled GPU systems. The space savings was 1,586 square feet or roughly 340 rack units, while annual electrical usage was reduced by 558,000 kilowatt hours, equating to an annual cost savings of $500,000.

Longer lifecycles, fewer refreshes

The Power architecture supports superior performance and lifecycle longevity for Linux workloads. Assessments performed by the IBM IT Economics team found that most Power users refresh their servers once every four to five years while the customary refresh cycle for x86 users is once every three to four years. Over 10 years, that translates to a 33% lower refresh cycle for Linux on Power than for Linux on x86. This results in decreased business disruptions and technology change-out costs such as planned outages, systems administration and labor, temporary parallel operation and large step increases in software and hardware maintenance (Figure 2).

Figure 2

In the 2019 ITIC Global Reliability Survey, 88% of survey respondents indicated that the cost of a single hour of downtime now exceeds $300,000 ($5,000 per minute). For an IT department refreshing just 10 servers within 60 minutes, that cost of replacement would be $3 million. Linux on Power has a 33% lower refresh cycle, which could save an IT shop $1 million or more in refresh costs.

Reliability and recoverability

Linux on IBM POWER9 leverages unique underlying hardware and virtualization capabilities to provide a more secure, reliable and recoverable environment than x86. Linux workloads on Power can take advantage of IBM Power Systems Enterprise Pools, Capacity on Demand (CoD) and Live Partition Mobility (LPM) to deliver 24×7 availability. These Power processor-specific features enable compute resources to be efficiently managed and rerouted based on changing business needs without incurring the cost or overhead of x86 disaster recovery implementations that require dedicated (yet often idle) compute resources.

All systems are at risk of security threats and implementation vulnerabilities. The IBM Power processor minimizes these threats with the highest level of security in the industry by using the same security design principles with Linux on Power as with IBM Z®. The POWER9 systems also use accelerated encryption built into the chip so that data is protected in motion and at rest. IBM PowerVM®, the underlying, firmware-based virtualization layer that’s standard with POWER9 systems, has zero reported security vulnerabilities, according to the U.S. government’s National Vulnerability Database (NVD). VMware®, a common hypervisor for Linux on x86, had 188 exposures reported on the NVD database over the last three years alone. According to the ITIC survey mentioned above, in 2018, Linux on Power users experienced a maximum of two minutes of unplanned downtime per server per year, or essentially 99.9996% uptime. Linux on x86 users experienced anywhere from 2.1 to 47 minutes of unplanned downtime per server, per year within the same time frame. This equates to as much as a 235% advantage for Linux on Power in terms of unplanned downtime, or $235,000 in savings per server, per year.

Ready your workloads for hybrid and multicloud

For cloud computing users, IBM Linux on Power is leading the way for mission-critical applications on hybrid and multicloud environments with the IBM acquisition of Red Hat®. Red Hat supercharges IBM Linux on Power capabilities with the addition of the Red Hat OpenShift® family of container software development and management tools. Recognition within the cloud and open-source communities using Red Hat has enabled IBM to provide integrated Power processor-based cloud offerings and IBM Cloud Paks® with notable cost savings. An example is SAP HANA® on IBM Power Systems virtualized in the IBM Cloud®. This Linux on Power cloud solution provides the benefits of running mission-critical SAP HANA on Power while tapping into the flexibility, reliability, security and performance advantages of Power to reduce IT costs.

An IBM IT Economics cost analysis for a large managed IT service provider in Latin America found cumulative cost savings over five years of running SAP HANA on Linux on Power versus Linux on x86. For this provider, the largest savings are due to significantly lower costs for networking, storage and compute hardware. In a separate analysis, Forrester® found that the average Power user running SAP HANA on Linux could save $3.5 million over a three-year period compared to Linux on an alternative hardware platform such as x86.

The top contender

When making a platform selection to host Linux workloads, examine the technical and financial benefits of IBM Power Systems. For many organizations, Linux on Power is the top contender for the job.

Source: ibm.com

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Labeyrie Fine Foods picks IBM Power Systems Virtual Server

Then your promise is to deliver premium foods across the globe, your IT infrastructure must be as reliable as your products and as agile as your supply chain. That’s why in November 2019 Labeyrie Fine Foods Group, international purveyor of food products, chose to add IBM Power Systems Virtual Server to their tech stack.

Founded in southwestern France in 1946, Labeyrie Fine Foods aims to be THE world benchmark for premium, trendy and responsibly sourced products (seafoods, regional products and aperitifs) made for sharing. It stays ahead of the curve in anticipating clients’ and consumers’ growing expectation of products from sustainable value chains, especially organically farmed products that contain no artificial ingredients.

After a first project based on the IBM Food Trust blockchain solution to enhance the traceability of its smoked salmon that was successfully implemented at the end of 2019, Labeyrie has taken a second step with the project to migrate its JD Edwards (JDE) ERP to IBM Power Systems™ Virtual Server. Labeyrie was able to migrate existing on-premises workloads easily by leveraging an identical technology stack as was designed for Power Systems.

The JDE ERP is a mission-critical workload for Labeyrie that serves as the backbone of their business and ensures the smooth running of Labeyrie’s management operations such as its supply chain.

Labeyrie naturally chose to partner with IBM on their ERP modernization project because of its position as the leading global and European integrator of Oracle’s JDE solutions and its expertise in 20 industrial sectors, including the food industry. In addition, IBM Power Systems Virtual Server for AIX® environments enabled Labeyrie to host their workloads in a European data center which helped them to stay compliant.

Integrating IBM Power Systems Virtual Server to their tech stack will allow Labeyrie to:

◉ Take advantage of the contributions of cloud computing in terms of operational and financial performance, with the possibility of benefiting from hourly billable cloud resources for specific needs

◉ Better respond to business lines’ expectations by refocusing IT on value-added tasks such as integrating new products in its traceability project

◉ Leverage IBM’s team of subject matter experts in private infrastructure as a service and cloud adoption technologies

◉ Secure the quality of services over time thanks to an IAAS model offering a constantly evolving catalog of services

Now with the ability to manage its Power Systems Virtual Server for AIX in one of the IBM European data centers, Labeyrie is able to access the enterprise-class POWER architecture in a flexible way in the cloud. Labeyrie now has the compute power and agility it needs to modernize and adapt to the requests and assure the best quality of service to its users and end customers.

Source: ibm.com

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Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform now available on IBM Power Systems Virtual Server

Following the announcement of Red Hat OpenShift 4.6 availability across IBM Power Systems, IBM Z, and IBM LinuxONE infrastructure alongside x86, IBM Power Systems is pleased to announce the availability of Red Hat OpenShift on Power Systems Virtual Server leveraging OpenShift’s platform-agnostic installer. Clients will now be able to further expand the cloud capabilities of their Power Systems infrastructure to deliver a resilient and secure hybrid cloud platform.

The offering is engineered so that IBM clients can easily spin up new OpenShift clusters as devtest environments as well as create highly available clusters capable of handling data-intensive workloads. Offering OpenShift on Power Virtual Server opens new doors for running a world of containerized applications including IBM Cloud Paks, Red Hat Runtimes, open-source software, and applications from independent software vendors.

IBM Cloud Paks™ provide the containerized IBM middleware and open-source software components to modernize, move and build cloud-native business applications in hybrid and multicloud deployments. Based on feedback, Power Systems clients are already speeding time-to-market and infusing AI insights into existing on-premises applications with the Cloud Pak for Data and can now extend that capability to Power Systems Virtual Server.

Why this is important for customers

As you plan to deploy containerized workloads, Red Hat OpenShift on Power Systems Virtual Server is designed to provide the flexibility and on-demand scalability to get to market faster in a secured environment. Power Virtual Server pay-as-you-go billing allows you to best allocate scarce resources and to adapt to changing needs of the business. Now you have the resources to develop modern OpenShift cloud-native container-based applications to run alongside existing AIX, IBM i and Linux-based applications. In addition, IBM Systems Lab Services provides a wealth of offerings to help you get started with OpenShift and containers on Power Systems.

Potential use cases

◉ Spin up devtest OpenShift clusters for cloud-native application development and application modernization projects

◉ Transform traditional IBM middleware into agile, cloud-native, container-based services

◉ Co-locate your IBM i and AIX applications with new cloud-native services on OpenShift on Power Virtual Server for simplified management and optimal performance

Easy to configure and operate

Our design goal has been to make it easy for customers to get started with Red Hat OpenShift on Power Systems Virtual Server. We have automated much of the installation with Ansible and other automation technologies so that even those customers new to Red Hat OpenShift and Kubernetes will find it easy to get a cluster up and running. Installing Cloud Paks and other applications is simplified with automation technology that offers a consistent deployment experience across Power Virtual Server and on premises.

IBM provides a step-by-step learning path that helps all skill levels to deploy an OpenShift cluster on Power Virtual Server and to learn about how to leverage the environment across a range of use cases.

Source: ibm.com

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Three common approaches to app modernization

If you’re like many IT organizations, you’ve got application modernization on your mind. Maybe you’ve already assessed your enterprise applications and are ready to put the pedal to the pavement on your next project. If so, it’s time to begin building your roadmap.

In previous posts one and two. we help you get started by exploring some steps you can take right now to modernize at your own pace. Becoming familiar with some common strategies can help you to minimize complexity along the way. So, let’s explore three common app modernization patterns and use cases to propel your modernization effort forward.

Case 1: Embrace containers and surround existing enterprise applications

Containers give you all sorts of technological benefits. You can isolate individual components, refactor and test them, redeploy and scale as needed without disrupting or updating the entire app. Plus, containers carry common sets of standards and security as they travel across your hybrid cloud. They’re lightweight, quick to start, and have consistent and portable app runtime. Now, developers can easily share these assets with each other, reducing the time to build.

To that end, containers give you an easier way to approach app modernization, which is to continue running existing traditional apps while you incrementally surround them with new and innovative cloud-native services.

For example, imagine that you’re a bank that wants to create a new mobile front-end interface or leverage cloud-based location services to find the nearest ATM using a banking app. Containers provide an approachable low-risk path that won’t disrupt your existing apps, yet also pave the way for innovation and skill development with new programming languages and development methodologies.

Adopting this strategy on IBM Power Systems or IBM Z® gives you a trusted platform where you can develop, run and manage apps and workloads in a consistent way across your hybrid cloud environment.

Case 2: Transition to containers

As your app modernization journey advances further and you grow comfortable with the technology, tools and practices involved, you can evaluate packaging apps inside containers, paving a path to more

portable applications across the cloud and more frequent software updates by leveraging DevOps practices.

Assuming your apps are based on portable technology (Java, for example), this is a fairly straightforward process. You usually do not have to make many changes to the app itself to reap the operational, management and monitoring benefits of containers paired with Red Hat OpenShift. For apps running native IBM AIX or IBM i technology (RPG or COBOL, for example), consider leaving them as-is and focusing on the “surround with containers” approach described previously. This provides a path to maximize innovation with new technologies while eliminating the large risk and expense of re-platforming.

Case 3: Rearchitect to cloud-native, microservices and API-first architecture

As described, the second step to application modernization is to transition your apps into containers. That does not necessarily mean those apps are truly cloud native. Each cloud-native application has a set of microservices representing each logical capability. Each microservice also has a well-defined API that sits on top of it to expose its capability. Because this approach typically requires changes to the application, it can take longer to complete than just moving your app into containers. With that in mind, taking an iterative approach to the process will keep things manageable.

Leveraging these approaches as part of your modernization journey will open doors to tremendous benefits. These include a quicker time to market, increased developer efficiency, app deployment flexibility, seamless integration with DevOps automation and access to the latest technology innovations.

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