Sundry Power Systems Cloud Announcements
April 26, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan
April is generally a busy time for the Power Systems team, and not just for IBM i, but also for AIX and sometimes for Linux, too. In the spirit of Power Systems family unity, and in recognition of the fact that more than a few IBM i shops also have AIX and/or Linux in their shops, we wanted to tell you about some tweaks that Big Blue has made to the other platforms in the Power Systems family.
In announcement letter 221-099, IBM is making some tweaks to the Power Systems Enterprise Cloud Edition stack of software. The components of the stack, which is available to run on AIX 7.2 or can be sold bundled with AIX 7.2, includes:
- PowerVC for Private Cloud 2.0 (this is the Power Systems implementation of the OpenStack cloud controller running atop AIX)
- PowerSC Standard 1.3
- PowerSC MFA 1.3
- VM Recovery Manager DR 1.5
- Aspera Endpoint 100 Mbps 1.0
- Tivoli Monitoring 6.3
With this update, VM Recovery Manager DR supports IBM’s System Storage DS8000, Storwize, and FlashSystem A9000 storage as well as Dell EMC VMAX, Hitachi Universal Replicator, and Hitachi TrueCopy. Power Systems Enterprise Cloud Edition is itself supported on Power8 and Power9 machinery. All but the updated VM Recovery Manager DR software was available on April 16; the former will be available on June 11. Customers with Software Maintenance (SWMA) on their systems will be the upgraded Power Systems Enterprise Cloud Edition stack as part of their normal update process.
Now, just to confuse the heck out of you, in announcement 221-084, we see that AIX Enterprise Editions 7.1 and 7.2 have been updated with new software. Take a look:
- PowerVC for Private Cloud 2.0
- PowerSC Standard 1.3
- PowerSC MFA 1.3
- VM Recovery Manager HA 1.5
- Tivoli Monitoring 6.3
Not much a of difference between Power Systems Enterprise Cloud Edition and AIX Enterprise Edition, now is there? One big difference is that the latter runs on Power7+ machinery as well as Power8 and Power9 gear.
I’m not saying this makes a lot of sense, and clearly we are missing something.
Finally, in announcement letter 121-045, we see that IBM is adding support for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server to the Power Systems Private Cloud Solution. This private cloud allows for base processor and memory resources to be along with IBM i and AIX licenses across a collection of Power Systems machines. Now, SLES is able to participate in Enterprise Pools (the version 2.0 release, to be precise) and have base and metered processor and memory allocations for it. This functionality is available on April 30.
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