Big Blue Offers Managed Services For PowerVS Private Cloud Pods
May 22, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan
There are lots of ways to skin the cloud infrastructure cat. You can rent cloudy capacity and manage it yourself. That is called Power Virtual Server. You can buy your own virtualized Power Systems servers and manage them with the same control plane as is used for the PowerVS cloud. That is called Power Virtual Server Private Cloud, of PowerVS Private Cloud for short. (Sort of.)
And now, with announcement letter AD24-0420, Big Blue is offering a version of PowerVS Private Cloud that has a managed services provider layer on top of it from the company’s own experts that allows IBM to manage that on-premises infrastructure as if it were part of its own cloud datacenters – for a fee, of course.
“IBM Power Virtual Server Private Cloud is an integrated as-a-service offering delivered deployment-ready for enterprise workloads,” the company writes in the announcement. “It comes with configurable compute, storage, and network infrastructure residing in your data center, and managed using IBM Cloud. With multiple IBM Cloud regions, the Power Virtual Server Private Cloud control plane software can meet your geographic regulatory needs, as all other Power Virtual services do today. You access the same control console through the IBM Power Virtual Server on IBM Cloud and deploy and manage your on-premises and cloud-based resources from the same single pane of glass.
The Power10 servers available under the PowerVS Private Cloud with managed services are being podded up for this offering, so don’t think that this is being done with onesies and twosies. There are small and medium pods in this particular announcement from May 21, which leads us to think that there might be large and extra large pods at some time in the future. Here are the feeds and speeds for the small pods, which are based on multiple Power S1022 of Power E1050 servers:
And here are the medium pods based on multiple racks of Power S1022, Power E1050, and Power E1080 servers:
Under this offering, compute, memory, storage, and operating system licenses are fully metered and IBM maintains the infrastructure and systems software up to the virtual machine (logical partition) level. The fully managed PowerVS Private Cloud packaging can be set up with IBM i 7.3, 7.4, or 7.5 partitions, AIX 7.2 or 7.3 partitions, or RHEL 9.2 or 8.6 partitions.
IBM is taking orders for these fully managed PowerVS Private Clouds starting on May 21 (yesterday). There was no general availability date or pricing given in the announcement letter. This offering is being made available in the United States, Canada, the Netherlands, Denmark, Austria, Germany, Belgium, Luxembourg, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and Australia.
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IBM’s new managed services for PowerVS Private Cloud represent a significant evolution in cloud infrastructure offerings. This service allows enterprises to leverage IBM’s expertise to manage their on-premises infrastructure with the same efficiency and control as their cloud datacenters. The integration of compute, storage, and network infrastructure, along with the flexibility of managing both on-premises and cloud-based resources from a single console, provides a seamless and scalable solution. Particularly interesting for the software development community, the support for IBM i, AIX, and RHEL partitions ensures a broad compatibility with various enterprise workloads. This managed service is a promising step towards simplifying and enhancing enterprise cloud strategies.