Get a Next-Gen Datacenter with IBM-Nutanix POWER8 System

First announced by IBM on May 16 here, this solution, driven by client demand for a simplified hyperconverged—combined server, network, storage, hardware, software—infrastructure, is designed for data-intensive enterprise workloads.  Aimed for companies increasingly looking for the ease of deployment, use, and management that hyperconverged solutions promise. It is being offered as an integrated hardware and software offering in order to deliver on that expectation.

Music made with IBM servers, storage, and infrastructure

IBM’s new POWER8 hyperconverged solutions enable a public cloud-like experience through on-premises infrastructure with top virtualization and automation capabilities combined with Nutanix’s public and on-premises cloud capabilities. They provide a combination of reliable storage, fast networks, scalability and extremely powerful computing in modular, scalable, manageable building blocks that can be scaled simply by adding nodes when needed.

Over time, IBM suggests a roadmap of offerings that will roll out as more configurations are needed to satisfy client demand and as feature and function are brought into both the IBM Cognitive Systems portfolio and the Nutanix portfolio. Full integration is key to the value proposition of this offering so more roadmap options will be delivered as soon as feature function is delivered and integration testing can be completed.

Here are three immediate things you might do with these systems:

1. Mission-critical workloads, such as databases, large data warehouses, web infrastructure, and mainstream enterprise apps
2. Cloud native workloads, including full stack open source middleware, enterprise databases
   and containers
3. Next generation cognitive workloads, including big data, machine learning, and AI

Note, however, the change in IBM’s pricing strategy. The products will be priced with the goal to remain neutral on total cost of acquisition (TCA) to comparable offerings on x86. In short, IBM promises to be competitive with comparable x86 systems in terms of TCA. This is a significant deviation from IBM’s traditional pricing, but as we have started to see already and will continue to see going forward IBM clearly is ready to play pricing flexibility to win the deals on products it wants to push.

IBM envisions the new hyperconverged systems to bring data-intensive enterprise workloads like EDB Postgres, MongoDB and WebSphere into a simple-to-manage, on-premises cloud environment. Running these complex workloads on IBM Hyperconverged Nutanix POWER8 system can help an enterprise quickly and easily deploy open source databases and web-serving applications in the data center without the complexity of setting up all of the underlying infrastructure plumbing and wrestling with hardware-software integration.

And maybe more to IBM’s ultimate aim, these operational data stores may become the foundational building blocks enterprises will use to build a data center capable of taking on cognitive workloads. These ever-advancing workloads in advanced analytics, machine learning and AI will require the enterprise to seamlessly tap into data already housed on premises. Soon expect IBM to bring new offerings to market through an entire family of hyperconverged systems that will be designed to simply and easily deploy and scale a cognitive cloud infrastructure environment.

Currently, IBM offers two systems: the IBM CS821 and IBM CS822. These servers are the industry’s first hyperconverged solutions that marry Nutanix’s one-click software simplicity and scalability with the proven performance of the IBM POWER architecture, which is designed specifically for data-intensive workloads. The IBM CS822 (the larger of the two offerings) sports 22 POWER8 processor cores. That’s 176 compute threads, with up to 512 GB of memory and 15.36 TB of flash storage in a compact server that meshes seamlessly with simple Nutanix Prism management.

This server runs Nutanix Acropolis with AHV and little endian Linux. If IBM honors its stated pricing policy promise, the cost should be competitive on the total cost of acquisition for comparable offerings on x86. DancingDinosaur is not a lawyer (to his mother’s disappointment), but it looks like there is considerable wiggle room in this promise. IBM Hyperconverged-Nutanix Systems will be released for general availability in Q3 2017. Specific timelines, models, and supported server configurations will be announced at the time of availability.

DancingDinosaur is Alan Radding, a veteran information technology analyst, writer, and ghost-writer. Please follow DancingDinosaur on Twitter, @mainframeblog. See more of his IT writing at technologywriter.com and here.

 

Tags: AI, analytics, Big Data, Cloud, cloud-native workloads, cognitive computing, cognitive workloads, containers, EDB Postgres, hyperconverged, IBM, IBM CS821, IBM CS822, Java, Linux, machine learning, MongoDB, Nutanix, Nutanix Acropolis, open source middleware, POWER8, pricing strategy, TCA, technology