Deploy and manage cloud environments with new software bundles on IBM Power Systems

17 December, 2018
Petra Bührer
IBM

While many companies use public cloud to improve agility and cost efficiency, the reality is that not all workloads are suited for public cloud. Some mission-critical workloads that require complete control over data and security are better suited to remain on premises and behind the corporate firewall. Today’s enterprises need the best of both worlds.

To help organizations strike the balance between public cloud and on-premises deployments, IBM is introducing two Enterprise Cloud Edition offerings. These cost-effective bundles of compelling software are designed to enable organizations to deploy and manage private clouds on IBM Power Systems. Businesses deploying Enterprise Cloud Edition on Power Systems can execute key capabilities such as:

  • Rapidly deploying and easily manage private clouds
  • Simplifying your security and compliance management support
  • Simplifying high availability management (HA)
  • Accelerating large file transfers in cloud environments

A powerful software suite built for cloud-ready agility

Enterprise Cloud Edition features a comprehensive range of software offerings designed to help organizations bring agility and flexibility to their cloud deployments.

  • Cloud PowerVC Manager for SDI which contains
    • Cloud PowerVC Manager, which offers simplified virtualization management and cloud deployments for IBM AIX, IBM i and Linux virtual machines (VMs) running on Power Systems.
    • IBM Spectrum Scale software presents a single, unified global namespace for a file system that spans all of an organization’s storage locations. It helps eliminate data access complexity for users and applications by creating a single data ocean that can help optimize the value of data assets.

PowerVC integrates with IBM Spectrum Scale to provide software-defined capabilities that are designed to enable organizations to simplify infrastructure and build SAN-less clouds.

  • Cloud Management Console provides enterprise-wide inventory, performance, logging and patch management insights and thus an aggregated view for Power Systems. Being a SaaS offering, it frees organizations from maintaining software to monitor infrastructure. It is tailored for mobile devices, tablets and desktop browsers.
  • IBM Cloud App Management offers end-user experience monitoring, transaction tracking and Predictive Insights (PI) as well as application-aware infrastructure monitoring and analysis designed for improved time to value for both development and operations teams.
  • PowerSC Standard Edition simplifies your security and compliance management for AIX and Linux virtual workloads running on Power Systems servers. It leverages and integrates the security features built at different layers of Power Systems stack and allows you to centrally manage security and provides pre-built profiles to support industry standards such as GDPR, HIPAA, PCI and more. It provides features such as real-time file integrity monitoring, reporting to support security audits, patching and more.
  • PowerSC MFA provides a central user interface to administer and manage multi-factor authentication (MFA). MFA requires that a user needs to provide several separate pieces of evidence in order to grant access to systems. MFA is mandated as part of several security regulations.
  • IBM BigFix Lifecycle helps businesses enforce security policies, automate endpoint security configuration management, and identify and respond to advanced persistent threats, regardless of endpoint type or location.
  • VM Recovery Manager HA offers simplified OS agnostic HA management with automated VM restart failover. It provides protection against failures of servers or hosts, individual VMs, and even applications inside.
  • Aspera and its proprietary Fast and Secure Protocol (FASP) transfer technology offers high-speed file transfer up to hundreds of times faster than FTP and HTTP for sending, sharing, streaming and syncing large files and data sets.

Operating system flexibility with two versions

Each offering listed above has been gaining momentum, and we are making the purchasing process much easier by offering them in a compelling bundle that can be purchased along with the server.

Some of the feedback we received for AIX Enterprise Edition included: “Could you add more offerings into AIX EE?” “What about a similar type of offering in the Linux space?” Some customers approached me stating: “I would love to put an AIX EE type offering–with JUST the SW components–on my entire environment on the whole box and then more flexibly decide which cores to license AIX and which cores to license Linux on – using AIX monthly or capacity on demand for instance.”

All of these questions made me come up with the new Enterprise Cloud Edition. As we have a lot of clients running AIX EE today who are or might be interested in upgrading to Enterprise Cloud Edition, we are making it available in two flavors:

  1. IBM Power Systems Enterprise Cloud Edition, which can be deployed on top of any of our Power Systems operating systems (primarily benefitting AIX & LoP for now as several components do not (yet) support IBM i.)
  2. IBM Power Systems Enterprise Cloud Edition with AIX, which includes AIX 7.2 Std. Ed. and allows for smooth upgrades from AIX EE.

power systems enterprise cloud edition with AIX

Learn more about how you can get started with Enterprise Cloud Edition.

If you would like to learn more about each offering in the bundle, please see PowerVC, PowerSC, VM Recovery Manager HA, Cloud Management Console, IBM Cloud App Management, Aspera, IBM Bigfix Lifecycle.

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