With the IBM Private Power Cloud Rack, Big Blue wants to accelerate cloud entry with packages consisting of POWER9 hardware and a preconfigured software stack.
Under the Label Private Power Cloud (PPC) Rack, IBM has assembled a new open hybrid cloud offering. It combines an optimized hardware and software stack of POWER9 servers and software from IBM’s and Red Hat’s portfolio and is intended to simplify the provision of a private cloud environment. IBM also presented new Power-Systems I/O extensions.
Two variants for developers and the RZ
The PPC rack offer, which IBM will be offering from March 12, There are two versions: for development and production environments. The former consists of a Power S922 node with 20 cores, 256 GB of RAM and 3.2 TB of NVMe storage. It runs RHEL 8, IBM’s PowerVM and PowerVC, and Red Hat’s OpenShift Container Platform for POWER. IBM’s Spectrum Storage Suite can be booked as an option.
For the production environment, there is a 42 U rack with three Power S922 nodes, a One FlashSystem 5200 with at least 9.6 TB, two 24 -Port switches (SAN24B-6) for 6th generation FibreChannel; A 52-port Layer2/3 switch can be ordered as an option. On the software side, Red Hat OpenShift Container Storage is added compared to the development variant.
New Linux drivers, AIX 7.3 this year
In addition to the all-round happy package for the cloud IBM introduced some extensions for its power systems. Among other things, there is only official Linux support for the PCIe3 x8 dual-port fiber channel adapter. The adapter is available for the S922, S914, S924, E950 and E980 models and now also for the H922 and H924. It requires at least RHEL 8 for POWER 8.3 or AIX 7.2 (7200-04 with Service Pack 7200-04-02-2028 or 7200-05) or higher. IBM has announced AIX 7.3 for this year.
