IBM also makes new z Systems announcements, and unveils several new and expanded partnerships at their Edge event.

5At their IBM Edge event in Las Vegas, Big Blue is making a series of announcements designed to enhance their hybrid cloud offerings. A key one is new Power Systems for cloud. The company also made new z Systems announcements, and highlighted a recent set of LC system announcements. IBM also made new partnership agreements with Hortonworks and Mirantis, and extended existing ones with Red Hat and IGINX.

“The new IBM Power Systems – the 880, 870 and 850 – are in the high end of our line,” said Satya Sharma, IBM Fellow and CTO, Power Systems. “They are targeted for customers who want to transform traditional infrastructures with a self-service cloud model, and the elastic consumption model that customers are increasingly finding attractive today.” These models have integrated OpenStack-based cloud management, and are designed to facilitate an on-prem private cloud for AIX, IBM i and Linux systems, with rapid access to compute services in the IBM Cloud.

“Even though these are higher end products, it’s just a fact of life today that these will be strong channel products,” Sharma said.

“The OpenStack based cloud management capability has been evolving over the last couple years, and with these models, we have added a self-service portal to this capability,” Sharma said. “We have also added a set of secure connectors to the cloud, which can be used without the need for writing any new code.”

Sharma also indicated that AIX customers looking for open source tools in automation space would benefit from a related announcement.

“We are announcing a new Open Source Automation project on the AIX,” he said. “We still support large numbers of open source packages on Linux, but we have ported them to AIX. Although they are open source, we will keep current with them, and we will address the security issues in these packages through this collaborative project.”

IBM is also announcing the new IBM Common Data Provider. It enables z Systems operational data to be efficiently consumed in near real time by the clients’ cloud or local enterprise operational analytics platform. These SaaS services, with Operational Insights and Hybrid Application Performance Management capabilities, analyze z System performance, provide recommended actions and enable continuous benchmarking. The Hybrid Application Performance Management provides end-to-end visibility for hybrid workloads.

IBM also announced a new solution, Spectrum Copy Data Management. It is designed to drive operational and development agility and efficiency across new and traditional applications by allowing detailed, easy-to-use management of data copies. IBM has also expanded its Spectrum Protect product with cloud object storage options for use in hybrid cloud deployments.

IBM also used the Edge event to highlight three new Power Systems LC solutions which were announced on September 9. The most notable is the IBM Power System S822LC for High Performance Computing. It features a newly designed processor, the POWER8 with NVIDIA NVLink, which is directly connected with the NVIDIA Tesla P100 Pascal GPUs through NVIDIA NVLink, a high-speed, energy-efficient bidirectional interconnect.

“This is a highly differentiated offering and a very powerful offering for the HPC space,” Sharma said.

The other two new LC servers are the IBM Power System S821LC, a 2 socket 1U system for high density computing, and the IBM Power System S822LC for Big Data.

IBM announced four partnerships at the event. Two are brand new. A new partnership with Hortonworks will see the two companies jointly enter the marketplace to sell Hortonworks Hadoop distribution on POWER. This will allow clients to utilize Open Enterprise Hadoop as a complementary component of their data architectures to enable a broad range of new applications, as well as to enrich existing ones with additional data sources.

A new partnership with Mirantis will see collaboration to develop reference architectures enabling Mirantis OpenStack to manage compute nodes hosted on IBM Power Systems servers, and to validate a host of core applications to run its OpenStack private cloud. This integration lets Mirantis bring its OpenStack based private cloud management to the POWER platform.

The other two partnering announcements are extensions of existing relationships. Long time partner Red Hat’s alliance is being expanded their alliance to address hybrid cloud through joint engineering and deeper product collaboration. The two companies will deliver solutions built on Red Hat’s portfolio of enterprise open source solutions and IBM Power System. NGINX’s application delivery platform now supports servers based on IBM’s POWER architecture, with the latest release of its commercial load balancer and web accelerator software, NGINX Plus R10.