IBM z System and Power Fuel Hybrid Cloud

DancingDinosaur has been cheerleading the z as a cloud player since 2011 and even before, mainly as an ideal vehicle for private clouds. So it should be no surprise to readers that last week IBM announced z and Power cloud-ready systems, services, and solutions for the hybrid cloud environment. My only question: What took them so long?

Power and z accelerate transformation to hybrid cloud

The world, indeed, is changing fast, and IT data centers especially have to scramble to keep up as they try to blend public cloud, private cloud, and traditional IT data centers and integrate it all seamlessly. “Today’s business environment is very dynamic and filled with disruption. A hybrid cloud model enables clients to continuously adapt while also optimizing on-premises investments and delivering the flexibility clients need across IBM Systems and the cloud,” according to Tom Rosamilia, senior vice president, IBM Systems.

At the heart of the IBM’s systems for what it calls the hybrid cloud era are three technologies we should be generally already familiar:

• z Systems for cloud. IBM z Systems Operational Insights is a new SaaS-based offering that provides analytic insights on cloud operations for new levels of efficiency and application performance. It allows users to make better business and application decisions based on trends and embedded expertise on performance data through a GUI dashboard. This accompanies IBM OMEGAMON Application Performance Management, which provides quick identification of problem components through end-to-end visibility for clients’ hybrid workloads that include z Systems applications.  In addition, the newly available IBM Common Data Provider enables z Systems operational data to be efficiently consumed in near real time by the clients’ cloud or local enterprise operational analytics platform. An OK start, but you can quibble with OMEGAMON as IBM’s performance analysis and management choice. At its core, this is old technology. DancingDinosaur would prefer, say, Watson.
• Power Systems for cloud. With integrated OpenStack-based cloud management and elastic consumption models, according to IBM, these new enterprise-class IBM Power Systems enable organizations to transform their IT infrastructure to a local cloud for AIX, IBM i and Linux workloads and extend them with rapid access to compute services in the IBM Cloud. DancingDinosaur covered the new LC here.
• IBM Spectrum Copy Data Management and Protect. This brings a new solution that drives operational and development agility and efficiency across new and traditional applications that allow detailed, easy management of data copies.  Additionally, IBM Spectrum Protect has expanded its extensive hybrid cloud solution integration with cloud object storage options for use in hybrid cloud deployments.

About the only thing missing above is LinuxONE but that will come up below when IBM gets to openness, which is critical to hybrid clouds. In its announcement, IBM also promised a series of new and expanded collaborations with IBM Systems for hybrid cloud environments, including:

• Canonical: Canonical and IBM are extending their ongoing alliance to make Ubuntu OpenStack available today on LinuxONE, z Systems, Power Systems, and OpenPOWER-based systems, including the new line of LC servers. This enables organizations to leverage Canonical’s portfolio across the three platforms with simplified and automated OpenStack management.
• Hortonworks: IBM and Hortonworks,  a Hadoop platform, are jointly entering the marketplace to make Hortonworks Hadoop distribution available on POWER. Whoopee, Hadoop already runs native on z.
• Mirantis: Mirantis and IBM are collaborating 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. With this integration, Mirantis will now bring its OpenStack based private cloud management to the POWER platform. This enables organizations to leverage the efficiency of IBM Power Systems for data-driven workloads in a seamless and compatible way for their data center through Mirantis’ OpenStack cloud management.
• NGINX: 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. The combination of NGINX Plus and POWER brings new agility to enterprises, allowing them to scale their infrastructure and application delivery solutions across any environment – public, private, and hybrid cloud; containers; and bare metal – providing a consistent user experience.
• Red Hat: Red Hat and IBM are expanding their long-standing alliance to better help organizations embrace hybrid cloud. Through joint engineering and deeper product collaboration, the two companies plan to deliver solutions built on key components of Red Hat’s portfolio of open source products, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux, (RHEL)., By the way, RHEL is the #2 Linux distro on the z. RHEL also enables IBM Power Systems as a featured component of Red Hat’s hybrid cloud strategy spanning platform infrastructure located both on and off an enterprise’s premises.

There is enough openness to enable you to do what you need so DancingDinosaur has no real complaints with IBM’s choices above. Just wish it was more z- and LinuxONE-centric.

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

 

IBM’s DeepFlash 150 Completes Its Flash Lineup for Now

Two years ago DancingDinosaur wrote about new IBM Flash storage for the mainframe. That was about the DS8870, featuring 6-nines (99.9999) of availability and real-time-compression. Then this past May DancingDinosaur reported on another new IBM all-flash initiative, including the all-flash IBM DS8888 for the z, which also boasts 6-nines availability. Just this week IBM announced it is completing its flash lineup with the IBM DeepFlash 150, intended as a building block for SDS (software defined storage) infrastructures.

IBM DeepFlash 150, courtesy of IBM

As IBM reports, the DeepFlash 150 does not use conventional solid-state drives (SSD). Instead, it relies on a systems-level approach that enables organizations to manage much larger data sets without having to manage individual SSD or disk drives. DeepFlash 150 comes complete with all the hardware necessary for enterprise and hyper-scale storage, including up to 64 purpose-engineered flash cards in a 3U chassis and 12-Gbps SAS connectors for up to eight host servers. The wide range of IBM Spectrum Storage and other SDS solutions available for DeepFlash 150 provides flash-optimized scale out and management along with large capacity for block, file and object storage.

The complication for z System shops is that you access the DeepFlash 150 through IBM Spectrum Scale. Apparently you can’t just plug the DeepFlash 150 into the z the way you would plug in the all flash DS8888. IBM Spectrum Scale works with Linux on z Systems servers or IBM LinuxONE systems running RHEL or SLES. Check out the documentation here.

As IBM explains in the Red Book titled IBM Spectrum Scale (GPFS) for Linux on z Systems: IBM Spectrum Scale provides a highly available clustering solution that augments the strengths of Linux on z by helping the z data center control costs and achieve higher levels of quality of service. Spectrum Scale, based on IBM General Parallel File System (GPFS) technology, is a high performance shared-disk file management solution that provides fast, reliable access to data from multiple nodes in a cluster environment. Spectrum Scale also allows data sharing in a mixed platform environment, which can provide benefits in cloud or analytics environments by eliminating the need of transferring data across platforms. When it comes to the DeepFlash 150 IBM is thinking about hyperscale data centers.

Hyperscale data centers can’t absorb the costs of constructing, managing, maintaining and cooling massive hyper- scale environments that use conventional mechanical storage, according to IBM. Those costs are driving the search for storage with a smaller physical footprint, lower costs, greater density, and, of course, much higher performance.

Enter DeepFlash 150, which introduces what IBM considers breakthrough economics for active data sets. The basic DeepFlash 150 hardware platform is priced under $1/GB. For big data deployments IBM recommends IBM Spectrum Scale with DeepFlash 150, providing customers with the overlying storage services and functionality critical for optimization of their big data workloads.

But even at $1/GB DeepFlash 150 isn’t going to come cheap. For starters consider how many gigabytes are in the terabytes or petabytes you will want to install. You can do the math. Even at $1/GB this is going to cost. Then you will need IBM Spectrum Scale. With DeepFlash 150 IBM did achieve extreme density of up to 170TB per rack unit, which adds up to a maximum 7PB of flash in a single rack enclosure.

IBM Spectrum Scale and the DeepFlash 150 are intended to support a wide range of file, object and Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) analytics work-loads. According to IBM, as a true SDS solution IBM Spectrum Scale can utilize any appropriate hardware and is designed specifically to maximize the benefits of hyper-scale storage systems like DeepFlash 150. Using a scale-out architecture, IBM Spectrum Scale can add servers or multiple storage types and incorporate them automatically into a single managed resource to maximize performance, efficiency, and data protection.

Although DeepFlash 150 can be used with a private cloud IBM seems to be thinking more in terms of hybrid clouds. To address today’s need for seamlessly integrating high-performance enterprise storage such as DeepFlash 150 with the nearly unlimited resources and capabilities of the cloud, IBM Spectrum Scale offers transparent cloud tiering to place data on cloud-based object storage or in a public cloud service. As IBM explains, the transparent cloud tiering feature of IBM Spectrum Scale can connect on- premises storage such as DeepFlash 150 directly to object storage or a commodity-priced cloud service. This allows enterprises to simultaneously leverage the economic, collaboration, and scale benefits of both on- premises and cloud storage while providing a single, powerful view of all data assets.

A Tech Target report on enterprise flash storage profiled 15 flash storage product lines. In general, the products claim maximum read IOPS ranging from 200,000 to 9 million, peak read throughput from 2.4 GBps to 46 GBps, and read latencies from 50 microseconds to 1 millisecond. The guide comes packed with a ton of caveats. And that’s why DancingDinosaur doesn’t think the DeepFlash 150 is the end of IBM’s flash efforts. Stay tuned.

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

 

Linux on System z Update

It has taken a decade but Linux has finally firmly established itself in the mainframe world. As recently as 2Q 2012, IBM was reporting two-thirds of its top 100 customers had deployed IFLs, the assist processor for running Linux on the mainframe. Overall, one-third of its System z customers have deployed IFLs. Regardless of whether you are running Linux on the z today or not, Linux on z along with Java saved the mainframe from becoming just another niche technology instead of the versatile core enterprise platform it is today.

SUSE Linux Enterprise is the dominant version on Linux on the mainframe.  SUSE now is owned by Attachmate, which says it will runs it as an independent business unit to ensure it continues to focus on the benefits of open source.  SUSE has about 65% of the mainframe Linux market. Ubuntu and Fedora have negligible presence among mainframe Linux.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) holds most of the remainder on the mainframe Linux market.  Red Hat also offers Fedora, another Linux distribution intended primarily for individuals. After making steady inroads into SUSE’s mainframe Linux market share, progress appears to have slowed in recent months. At its annual Red Hat Summit last June the company celebrated crossing the $1 billion annual revenue threshold, a major achievement for any organization but especially for one built around an open source product.  The Red Hat event returns to Boston in 2013, June 11-14.

The Red Hat gathering  focused on the current hot IT issues—cloud, mobility, and cloud storage—but the mainframe was noticeably  absent. There has been some shifting of responsibilities among Red Hat personnel regarding the mainframe, but DancingDinosaur has been told it remains an active initiative. DancingDinosaur believes RHEL on the mainframe can certainly play an integral role in driving RHEL adoption throughout the enterprise, especially as it spreads through IBM’s various hybrid computing and cloud initiatives. And having two active Linux on z providers is good for mainframe computing.

This coming fall marks the first SUSECon event, something SUSE intends to make into an annual event. Planned for Orlando FL, Sept. 18-21, the event already is promoting Doug Balog, general manager, IBM System z, as a keynote. Balog is responsible for IBM’s worldwide System z server business. The conference promises to address enterprise Linux in the data center, cloud technology and infrastructure, and Linux systems management; basically what you’d expect.

In the meantime, SUSE released the second Service Pack for SUSE Linux Enterprise 11, which includes advanced exploitation of the latest IBM zEnterprise hardware, improved systems management, increased performance, and better problem analysis and resolution.  For example, new support for SSD makes it transparent to the DASD device driver, meaning no change required to use SSD

In terms of Linux functionality on the mainframe users see little differentiation between SUSE and RHEL from a product functionality standpoint. Makes sense since both are based on the Linux open source kernel. DancingDinosaur has profiled mainframe shops using each distribution. The choice often comes down to familiarity, services, and vendor attention to the customer. As hybrid computing gains traction among mainframe and Power shops and eventually PureSystems shops, however, the vendor—SUSE or Red Hat—that best addresses these new optimized multi-platform environments may gain an advantage.

For now, distinctions are minimal. A leading insurance company reports that it ended up using both distributions on its mainframe, starting first with Red Hat and then switching to SUSE and, a few years later, switching back to Red Hat.  As the project manager noted: “Either one works fine; you simply have to consider if your company already has a relationship with one of the vendors, your workload requirements, and any cost differences for code and support.” You also need to consider vendor readiness to support future initiatives like cloud, hybrid computing, mobile, and social business.

But changes are coming fast. IBM is inviting the industry to tomorrow’s virtual announcement of what it bills as the next generation zEnterprise system. Check it out.  DancingDinosaur will cover it in the next post.

Red Hat Summit Challenges IBM and zEnterprise

The Red Hat Summit in Boston this week showed off a slew of new products, some of which are sure to challenge IBM although none included hardware. As for the zEnterprise there was little beyond RHEL specifically aimed its way.

Although IBM has a long relationship with Red Hat, it is becoming clear that in some cases the two companies compete.  Despite moments of discomfort, IBM managers still are generally amenable to working closely with Red Hat. Coopetition, a mix of cooperation and competition, increasingly is the norm for all technology companies, not just IBM and Red Hat.  Both companies, for instance, have a strong interest in promoting KVM, which provides a low price hypervisor option. But as one IBM manager noted, price is only a door opener for a bigger discussion.  From that bigger discussion, IBM still holds more and stronger cards when it comes to delivering a complete customer solution.

The centerpiece of the conference was Red Hat’s announcement of four open hybrid solutions; hybrid here refers to the blend of public and private clouds. Find the announcement here. The four open hybrid cloud solutions consist of:

• OpenShift Enterprise PaaS Solution combines Red Hat CloudForms, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization and JBoss Enterprise Middleware. It aims to deliver the speed and agility of PaaS desired by enterprise developers while addressing the governance and operational requirements of enterprise IT in an open and hybrid cloud.

• Red Hat Hybrid Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) Solution, described by Red Hat as the industry’s first open hybrid cloud solution for enterprises, it includes the software needed to deploy and manage a hybrid cloud, including virtualization management with Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization; cloud management, governed self-service and systems management with Red Hat CloudForms; and guest operating system with Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

• Red Hat Cloud with Virtualization Bundle, promises to move enterprises to the cloud for the price of virtualization and consists of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization and Red Hat CloudForms, effectively combining virtualization and cloud management into the same project cycle.

• Red Hat Storage, a software-only offering provides open source scale-out storage software for the management of unstructured data.  It is generally available with Red Hat Storage Server 2.0 today but the company has big ambitions for this.

All the above are software-only solutions. Red Hat is not getting into either the server or storage hardware business. Of these, the OpenShift PaaS product, which promises an easy on-ramp to open hybrid cloud computing with reduced complexity, sounds a little like IBM PureSystems and particularly the IBM PureSystems PureApplication System, which provides a fully integrated  hardware/software PaaS offering in a box.

Red Hat Storage, which is built around Red Hat’s recent Gluster acquisition, an open source software company that maintained GlusterFS, an open source, distributed file system capable of scaling to petabytes and beyond while handling thousands of clients. GlusterFS brings together storage building blocks over an Infiniband, RDMA, or TCP/IP interconnects to aggregate disk and memory resources and manage data within a single global namespace.

GlusterFS supports standard clients running standard applications over any standard IP network.  Red Hat’s GlusterFS gives users the ability to deploy scale-out, virtualized storage through a centrally managed and commoditized pool of storage while freeing them from monolithic legacy storage platforms.

The poster child for Red Hat Storage today is Pandora, which delivers music on demand over the net. Pandora put Red Hat Storage across 100 NAS nodes, producing what amounts to NAS in the cloud.  Where organizations have IBM storage, Red Hat Storage will virtualize and manage it as it does any other storage.

The most interesting discussion DancingDinosaur had revolved around Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). RHEL has experienced generally steady growth, and the RHEL team is cocky enough to target selected Microsoft workloads to drive further growth.  RHEL appears to be a dominant Linux distribution everywhere but on the z. Among z shops running Linux,  RHEL is treading water at around 33% share. SUSE is the dominant Linux distribution on z.  Given the upheaval SUSE has experienced you’d expect the zEnterprise to be a RHEL growth opportunity, especially with growing interest in multi-platform hybrid computing involving the z. Red Hat clearly needs to pay more attention to the z.

zBX and the Next IBM Hypervisor

Even before the zEnterprise/zBX was introduced, most mainframe data centers were multi-platform, multi-OS shops. IBM had z/VM and Power VM as hypervisors for System z and Power systems, but in the x86 world VMware ESX ruled, followed by Microsoft’s Hyper-V.

So, it was significant when IBM announced in early May that it and Red Hat, an open source technology leader, are working together to make products built around the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) open source technology for the enterprise. Jean Staten Healy, IBM’s Director of Worldwide Cross-IBM Linux, told IT industry analysts that the two companies together are committed to driving adoption of the open source virtualization technology through joint development projects and enablement of the KVM ecosystem. DancingDinosaur touched on aspects of this several weeks ago, here.

Differentiating the KVM approach from those taken by the current x86 virtualization leaders is open source technology. An open source approach to virtualization, Healy noted, lowers costs, enables greater interoperability, and increases options through multiple sources.

The KVM open source hypervisor allows a business to create multiple virtual versions of Linux and Windows environments on the same server. Companies can take KVM-based products and combine them with comprehensive management capabilities to create highly scalable and reliable, fully cloud-capable systems that enable the consolidation and sharing of massive numbers of virtualized applications and servers.

Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV), for example, was designed for such large scale datacenter virtualization by combining its centralized virtualization management capabilities and advanced features with the KVM hypervisor. BottomlineIT looked at the Red Hat open source approach to virtualization a few weeks ago.

The open source approach to virtualization is starting to gain traction. To that end Red Hat, IBM, BMC, HP, Intel, and others joined to form the Open Virtualization Alliance. Its goal is to facilitate  the adoption of open virtualization technologies, especially KVM. It intends do this by promoting examples of customer successes, encourage interoperability, and accelerate the expansion of the ecosystem of third party solutions around KVM. A growing and robust ecosystem around KVM is essential if the open source hypervisor is to effectively rival VMware and Microsoft.

IBM’s interest in KVM also raises the question of which hypervisor—z/VM, PowerVM, RHEL in the form of RHEV with KVM, or something else—will become the preferred hypervisor for the zBX, especially when organizations start running Power and System x blades and mixed workloads. In an interview with the Register a few months back, Jeff Frey, an IBM Fellow and contributor the zEnterprise/zBX laid out the hypervisor challenge with the zBX:

• zEnterprise—IBM’s own Processor Resource/System Manage (PR/SM) type 1 hypervisor and its related z/VM operating system (which can function as a type 2 hypervisor) will continue to direct resource activity on the zEnterprise 196.
• PowerVM—a hypervisor that divides Power systems and blades into logical slices to virtualize I/O as well as to support AIX continues with IBM’s Power platforms.
• IBM’s System x—Xeon blades will use a version of KVM that works with System z firmware.

The hypervisors on the Power and Xeon blades are treated like other system firmware on the mainframe. Not only do PR/SM, PowerVM, and RHEV get treated like firmware on the z but are linked back to the zEnterprise and the Unified Resource Manager via a built-in Gigabit Ethernet network implemented in a switch in the z.

Result: The switch hooks into the Advanced Management Module in the BladeCenter chassis, while the Unified Resource Manager uses SNMP to manage the BladeCenter and zBX hardware and has hooks into the PowerVM and KVM hypervisors to manage virtual machine partitions on the Power and Xeon blades.

For IBM the KVM technology is particularly well suited to address cloud challenges. It provides a predictable and familiar environment, auditable security compliance, and an open source licensing model that keeps costs down while requiring no additional skills. This makes it particularly cost-effective for large-scale cloud use, public or private, which is where IBM sees all this virtualization taking enterprises.

IBM Expands Red Hat Partnership

IBM further embraced open source last week at Red Hat’s user conference in Boston around virtualization and cloud initiatives. The relationship, however, has been growing for over a decade as Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) becomes increasingly popular on the System z. The arrival of x and Power blades for the zBX should only increase the presence of RHEL on the System z.

Last year IBM selected Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) as a platform option for its development and test cloud service. Dev and test has emerged as a natural for cloud computing given its demands for quick setup and take down.

Although there weren’t any major specific System z announcements almost all System z shops run a mix of platforms, including System x for Linux and Windows, the Power platform for AIX and Linux, and are making forays into private, public, and hybrid clouds. So there was plenty coming out of the conference that will interest mainframe shops even if it wasn’t System z-specific.

With that in mind, here are three new Red Hat initiatives that will be of interest in mainframe shops:

First, open virtualization based on Red Hat’s open source KVM hypervisor. This enables an organization to create multiple virtual versions of Linux and Windows environments on the same server. This will help save money through the consolidation of IT resources and without the expense and limitations of proprietary technology. RHEV, an open source option, delivers datacenter virtualization by combining its centralized virtualization management system with the KVM hypervisor, which has emerged as a top hypervisor behind VMware.

According to Red Hat, RHEV delivers 45% better consolidation capacity than its competitors according to a recent Spec 1 virtualization benchmark and brings architectural support for up to 4,096 processor cores and up to 64TB of memory in the host, 32 virtual CPUs in the guest, and 1TB of RAM. This exceeds the abilities of proprietary hypervisors for Linux and Windows. Red Hat also reports RHEV Virtualization Manager can enable savings of up to 80% relative to comparable proprietary virtualization products in the first year (initial acquisition cost) and up to 66% over a course of three years. Finally support for such security capabilities as multi-tenancy combined with its scalability make it a natural for cloud computing.

Second, Red Hat introduced a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) initiative, called OpenShift, to simplify cloud development and deployment and reduce risk. It is aimed at open source developers and provides them with a flexible platform for developing cloud applications using a choice of development frameworks for Java, Python, PHP and Ruby, including Spring, Seam, Weld, CDI, Rails, Rack, Symfony, Zend Framework, Twisted, Django and Java EE. It is based on a cloud interoperability standard, Deltacloud, and promises to end PaaS lock-in, allowing developers to choose not only the languages and frameworks they use but the cloud provider upon which their application will run.

By building on the Deltacloud cloud interoperability standard, OpenShift allows developers to run their applications on any supported Red Hat Certified Public Cloud Provider, eliminating the lock-in associated with first-generation PaaS vendors. In addition it brings the JBoss middleware services to the PaaS experience, such as the MongoDB services and other RHEL services.

Third, Red Hat introduced CloudForms, a product for creating and managing IaaS in private and hybrid clouds. It allows users to create integrated clouds consisting of a variety of computing resources and still be portable across physical, virtual and cloud computing resources.  CloudForms addresses key problems encountered in first-generation cloud products: the cost and complexity of virtual server sprawl, compliance nightmares and security concerns.

What will make CloudForms of particular interest to heterogeneous mainframe shops is its ability to create hybrid clouds using existing computing resources: virtual servers from different vendors, such as Red Hat and VMware; different cloud vendors, such as IBM and Amazon; and conventional in-house or hosted physical servers, both racks and blades. This level of choice helps to eliminate lock-in and the need to undergo migration from physical to virtual servers in order to obtain the benefits of cloud.

Open source is not generally a mainframe consideration, but open source looms large in the cloud. It may be time for System z shops to add some of Red Hat’s new technologies to their System z RHEL, virtualization, and cloud strategies as they move forward.