What Exactly Is IBM Cloud Pak System Software Suite 2.3.5?
October 7, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan
When I moved to New York City back in 1989, I didn’t have to worry much about directions. Like most new New Yorkers, I built a small town of my own out of the locations of my apartment, my work, a few restaurants, and a few bars, and the rest of the vast island of Manhattan was a big, living movie set.
It wasn’t until I had my first child a decade later that I was in a car and understood how maddeningly bad signage was in the Big Apple, and indeed in many other places. And it was so frustrating that I coined a phrase about trying to get around in the powder blue Ford Taurus station wagon with the kids: If you don’t already know how to get there, well, that is not my problem – it’s yours.
Sometimes, reading IBM announcement letters is like this, and I find it frustrating on your behalf. I don’t mean to pick on the people who write these announcement letters – for all I know it was generated by AI – but announcement letter AD24-2165, which came out on October 1, is a good case in point.
The announcement has a title that caught our eye – IBM Cloud Pak System Software Suite 2.3.5 supports bring-your-own-hardware for IBM Power systems – and we tried to figure out what it is and why this might be important for you to know about. We know that IBM Cloud Paks are containerized packages of IBM middleware and other open source systems software and applications that can be run atop OpenShift Kubernetes containers, which means on Linux partitions, and that there are related Cloud Pak services that IBM also makes available.
This is pretty much the entire text of the announcement:
“IBM Cloud Pak System Software Suite provides hybrid cloud capabilities. Version 2.3.5 is a software-only solution that helps organizations to build, deploy, and manage workloads that are virtual machine-based on their own IBM Power systems.
For system requirements, see Release notes and System requirements topics in IBM Cloud Pak for System Software 2.3.5.
Version 2.3.5 does not support upgrading from earlier product versions that previously supported bring-your-own-hardware deployment on IBM Power Systems.
Program information, including system requirements, tech notes, training, support, and more, will be available on or before planned availability in IBM Cloud Pak System Software 2.3.5.”
I clicked through on the release notes, and I still could not figure out precisely what IBM Cloud Pak System Software 2.3.5 is. There was no description of precisely what it is, and I did not get an explanation of why bring your own hardware is important. But it looks like this Cloud Pack is an overlay on top of OpenShift. This page gives you a better feel, and it sounds like the virtualization management tools that were created a long time ago for IBM’s Pure Flex and PureSystems machines – remember those? – from way back in 2012.
Here is the point: If we can’t tell what something is, we can’t tell if it is important enough to care about, much less to buy. The announcement letters, release notes, and documentation coming out of IBM have to do a better job explaining this.
Just for fun, I logged into the Claude 3 chatbot from Anthropic and asked it what the heck is IBM Cloud Pak System Software Suite 2.3.5. It didn’t know much, either:
“IBM Cloud Pak System Software Suite 2.3.5 appears to be a specific version of IBM’s Cloud Pak system software. However, I don’t have detailed, verified information about this particular version in my knowledge base.
IBM Cloud Pak systems are generally integrated platforms designed to help enterprises modernize existing applications and develop new cloud-native apps. They typically run on Red Hat OpenShift and provide a range of cloud services and capabilities.
The “2.3.5” likely refers to a specific version or release number of this software suite. Different versions may include updates, new features, or bug fixes.
To get accurate and up-to-date information about IBM Cloud Pak System Software Suite 2.3.5, I’d recommend checking IBM’s official documentation or contacting IBM directly. They would be able to provide the most current and detailed information about this specific version’s features, improvements, and system requirements.
Since this is a very specific product version that may not be widely documented, I want to remind you that while I strive for accuracy, I may not have completely accurate information about such specialized software versions. It’s always best to verify details with the official source for the most current information.”
Yeah, no kidding. So far, these chatbots are not worth very much as far as I am concerned. They are good for looking up recipes. . . .
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😀 you stole me a smile… never heard of it, the overall quality is decreasing also in the announcement department it seems. The western world is becoming a “package”-world. You buy a car and then extra packages. Holidays have packages. Even economic sanctions we issue in “packages” 🙂 The end results, is our language framing is becoming what we frame.
Layer over layers, and additional layers to solve the problems consequential to layering 😀
In this magazine context, I say that the simplicity of the IBMi should be a marketed value of the system.