Envision your data center a year from today. What has changed? Have you gained efficiency? Lowered costs? Increased agility and flexibility? These are just a few of the goals IBM Power Systems™ clients are focused on as they seek to integrate and extend their most mission-critical applications into hybrid cloud environments. The journey to hybrid cloud requires a variety of tools — not a one-size-fits-all approach — to successfully transform your operations.

Today we are announcing new capabilities available on the IBM Power Systems platform to help meet your business needs, no matter what point you are at in transforming your data center for the hybrid cloud era. You will have more options to leverage industry-leading scalability[1], reliability[2] for VM based containerized applications and security built in at all layers from the processor to the OS. Clients can modernize their AIX^®, IBM i and Linux^® applications by deploying them in a hybrid cloud environment, automating common IT operations with Ansible, and co-locating containerized workloads with VM-based applications.

Unified enterprise hybrid cloud experience 

IBM Power Systems enables clients to move their mission-critical applications across hybrid cloud without refactoring or re-platforming. Now, we are adding more capabilities to provide a unified experience to acquire capacity in all Power^®environments.

• IBM is extending that ability to hybrid cloud by piloting hybrid capacity credits, which can be purchased and used to unlock capacity on on-premises servers as well as on IBM Power Virtual Servers. IBM is also working with other ecosystem partners to further extend dynamic capacity across multiple Linux distributions.
• IBM is helping you to drive agility with new Ansible modules from Red Hat^® Ansible^® Certified Content for IBM Power Systems[3] across your hybrid cloud deployments on AIX, IBM i and Linux environments. IBM Power Systems 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 & provisioning, bringing the total number of POWER-supported Ansible modules to 102. Currently, there are 102 Ansible modules, downloaded more than 13,000 times since February 2021, that support POWER and are available to the open-source community on GitHub. Many of these same modules are available as production-ready, enterprise-hardened and certified Ansible Collections through the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform.”[4]

>> Read more: Ansible and IBM Power Systems Content Collection

Modernize existing applications

Now you are well into mapping out your hybrid cloud data center and looking to the future with new workloads. IBM Power Systems remains committed to supporting the modernization of your existing applications and building new cloud-native workloads required for transformation and business growth. With a robust 10+ year roadmap for AIX and IBM i, we are committed to delivering capabilities and solutions to help you meet today’s needs and prepare for future challenges.

• AIX 7.3 is coming to your data center in 2021. It will continue a 35-year tradition of innovation with enhanced capabilities that deliver resiliency, security and scale needed to get your IT environment ready for hybrid cloud.
• For clients who cannot upgrade currently or need more time to upgrade to IBM i 7.3, we are now supporting IBM i 7.1 on Power Systems Virtual Server co-located with IBM Cloud^®.

>> Read more: AIX: 35 Years of Innovation

Build new application services

IBM Power Systems continues to deliver modern capabilities to simplify the build of new cloud-native applications with OpenShift, which can be co-located with your existing AIX and IBM i applications.

• Simplify and accelerate private cloud deployments with the new IBM Power Systems Private Cloud Rack Solution. This is a pre-configured system with compute, storage, networking and pre-installed software to match an organization’s existing infrastructure, whether it is based around Linux, IBM i or AIX. It can help organizations operationalize their cloud management and provide an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) environment to help clients accelerate development and operations for Kubernetes container-based cloud-native applications with Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform.
• Expand into public cloud with Red Hat OpenShift® on Power Virtual Server leveraging OpenShift’s platform-agnostic installer[5]. IBM Power Virtual Server is an enterprise IaaS offering built around IBM POWER9^™, offering low-latency access to over 200 IBM Cloud services. In addition, IBM Power Virtual Server clients can now run leading business applications like SAP HANA in an IBM POWER9-based cloud.
• Red Hat Runtimes are now available on Power Systems, delivering a consistent development experience for applications that span across Power and other platforms.

>> Read more: IBM extends the OpenShift experience to Power Virtual Server and IBM Power Systems Private Cloud Rack Solution

Imagine your data center in 2022 and beyond. With our approach to continue delivering new capabilities, IBM Power Systems gives you the right infrastructure platform and co-optimized solutions to power your hybrid enterprise now and into the future!

Statements regarding IBM’s future direction and intent are subject to change or withdrawal without notice and represent goals and objectives only.

Red Hat, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, the Red Hat logo, Ansible and OpenShift are trademarks or registered trademarks of Red Hat, Inc. or its subsidiaries in the U.S. and other countries. Linux® is the registered trademark of Linus Torvalds in the U.S. and other countries.