IBM quietly announces Power-powered private cloud in a rack to 'evolve' your apps

IBM has quietly unveiled its “Power Private Cloud Rack solution,” a converged infrastructure product that offers an off-ramp from AIX and a path into the wonderful world of cloud-native applications. Big Blue's announcement today states the new rig requires at least three Power System S922 servers with 20 CPU cores, 256GB of …

[Anonymous Coward]

roomer has it

Oz fed gov already considering something like this. Apparently AIX admins like to be paid well and manglement think linux is the future.

[seven of five]

Re: roomer has it

> Apparently AIX admins like to be paid well

And not without good reason. Not many remain, and even the younger ones are quite experienced by now.

[MyffyW]

Re: this boomer (or Gen X) has it

Is it wrong that I get all nostalgic thinking about past AIX projects? Or just a sign of my advancing years?

[lamp]

Re: roomer has it

I wonder what the power bill will be like for one of these...

[Peter Gathercole]

Re: roomer has it

When the Linux offerings take advantage of all of the RAS (Reliability and Serviceability) features that the AIX/Power combination can offer, then it will be fit for full-blown enterprise deployment.

Until then, the 'multiple instances so we can afford to lose some' will have to suffice. And this does not mean VMs/containers on a single large system, because at some point, you have to do maintenance on that large system. Thankfully this rig has at least three 2U servers, although the 2U form factor on these systems makes hotswap and concurrent maintenance difficult or impossible.

AIX/Power systems are expensive for a reason, and it's not (all) about IBM's bottom line.

[dedmonst]

or just migrate to x86 eh?

so you can move off the "boutique offering" that is AIX/Power these days to (check's notes) the even more "boutique offering" that is RHEL/Power

[Anonymous Crowbar]

Re: Stop pissing about

Last time i was doing AIX about 5/6 years ago we implemented a tool called PowerVM.

Basically you added your SANs and Switches [we used both v7000 and the AFA FS9000], added your Power Systesm [775s and 795s], VIOServers and it was all in a web interface. You could spin out AIX LPARs in a few minutes.

It basically felt like OpenStack on Power.

It was pretty cool to use if you were an old school unix admin.

[seven of five]

Re: Stop pissing about

Oh my...

What you describe are shared storage pools running on virtual i/o servers (which in turn are part of the much older PowerVM). Given you mention a web interface (go wash your mouth), this most probably were E880C model servers IBM desperately shopped around about that time. Which came with an open stack based web thingy called PowerVC. Was ok until you had one piece of non-IBM hardware (then it all crashed or fucked the entire infrastructure) or cared to ever administer your hardware ever again without it. This tool leaves scorced earth.

Also it lacks a lot of flexibilty concerning the setup of your lpar, so in the end you build your systems within its limited features or build by hand. You can not use PowerVC and the HMC in parallel.

"It was pretty cool to use if you were an old school unix admin."

In this case, I might be an older school unix admin.

edit: don't get me wrong, SSP on vios are great. It is just PVC which isn't.

[Uncle Ron]

Huh?

Why does anyone buy anything from Oracle?