IBM brings Red Hat to Power Systems

IBM has introduced Red Hat Linux on its RISC-based Power Systems servers, further expanding IBM’s private- and hybrid-cloud offerings on the traditionally Unix-based hardware.

IBM already has what it calls Enterprise Linux on Power, but this is bringing Red Hat, which IBM paid $34 billion to acquire, to its big iron. IBM Power Systems now feature Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Power Virtual Server leveraging OpenShift’s bare metal installer, Red Hat Runtimes, and newly certified Red Hat Ansible Content Collections.

Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Power Virtual Server is a move to bring the OpenShift container platform to IBM Power Virtual Server. The IBM Power Virtual Server is an enterprise infrastructure-as-a-service offering built around IBM POWER9 and offering access to more than 200 IBM Cloud services. In addition, IBM Power Virtual Server clients can now run business applications like SAP HANA in an IBM POWER9-based cloud.

To help organizations and developers create cloud-native applications, Red Hat Runtimes is now supported on IBM Power Systems. Red Hat Runtimes is a set of products, tools and components designed to develop and maintain cloud-native applications, so POWER9 systems now have the frameworks and runtimes that provide a single development experience for hybrid applications spanning IBM Power Systems and other platforms.

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform was made available on IBM Power Systems last year, and IBM 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 and provisioning. Currently, there are 102 Ansible modules that support POWER available on GitHub.

There is new hardware as well. IBM Power Private Cloud Rack Solution provides customers an optimized, production-level OpenShift platform to modernize traditional environments with cloud-native applications. IBM Power Private Cloud Rack combines on-premises hardware, a complete software stack of IBM and Red Hat technology, and installation from IBM Systems Lab Services. IBM says it delivers 49% lower cost per request as compared to similarly equipped x86-based platforms .

This also causes a little confusion because IBM now has both the Power Private Cloud Rack and the Power Private Cloud with Dynamic Capacity, which is a renaming of what was formerly known as Enterprise Pools 2.0.

The difference is Power Private Cloud Rack Solution is a preconfigured, on-premises system, while Power Private Cloud with Dynamic Capacity operates more like HPE’s GreenLake systems in that the hardware is overprovisioned for initial needs and you can purchase additional compute cores as needed and get cloud-like elasticity.