Private PowerVS Pods Now Available For On-Premises Power10 Iron

October 7, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

The number of system vendors that also run clouds, or cloud vendors that also sell systems, is very small because doing both is exceedingly capital intensive – one for research and development, and the other for acquiring gear and deploying it so its capacity can be rented to others.

Dell and Hewlett Packard Enterprise, the two biggest server OEMs in the world, both tried to build clouds and failed, and so did VMware now that we think about it. Oracle bought its way into the systems business with its 2009 acquisition of Sun Microsystems, and while it no longer creates Sparc platforms, it still has a respectable X86 server business and it has recently surpassed IBM as the number five cloud vendor. IBM has been selling systems as we know them for more than six decades and it bought its way into the X86 cloud business with its SoftLayer acquisition in 2013. For reasons that many of us found very frustrating, the IBM Cloud, as the SoftLayer business came to be known, largely ignored Power Systems customers in that cloud. But in recent years, the Power Systems division has worked with IBM Cloud to stand up virtualized and cloudy instances in selected IBM Cloud regions, called Power Virtual Server or PowerVS for short.

These days, IBM has 21 datacenters around the world that are running PowerVS workloads, and it has more than 650 Power Systems customers who have deployed production, test/dev, and high availability/disaster recovery workloads on the IBM Cloud with PowerVS metered infrastructure. And Doris Conti, vice president of Power Systems product management at IBM, tells The Four Hundred that the PowerVS business has eight consecutive quarters of double digit revenue growth and triple digit signings growth for that PowerVS business.

At this rate, PowerVS will be a significant part of the Power Systems revenue stream within the next few years, even though we still think that many IBM i and AIX shops will still buy on premises iron. The neat thing about what IBM is doing – and that is distinct from what all of the other clouds and OEMs are doing with the exception of Oracle – is that the company is trying to eliminate all of the differences possible in how its on premises machines and its cloudy VMs are packaged and priced so customers can mix and match between the two consumption models seamlessly and also manage both kinds of infrastructure using the same PowerVS tools.

Big Blue has been evolving the PowerVS offering over the years, and has made no secret of its goal to sell on-premises and cloud infrastructure in the same utility-priced manner, and to make the two experiences so similar that customers no longer need to care about where their systems are deployed and can focus on using them.

As we reported back in May, IBM quietly started offering a version of PowerVS Private Cloud that has a managed services provider layer on top of it, which allows Big Blue to manage that on-premises infrastructure as if it were part of its own cloud datacenters – for a fee, of course. You can see more about it in announcement letter AD24-0420, but don’t get too excited, it doesn’t say much. It does offer interesting configurations for the pods of Power Systems iron that IBM is putting together, which we will review in a second.

Since May, IBM has been working on its messaging and branding, and Conti says that despite the unwieldy naming conventions that Big Blue is famous for – and honestly, HPE is far worse when it comes to product and offering names – she is trying to encourage everyone to talk like there is just one PowerVS and there is a private or cloud option, if you want to use that language as a modifier, or on premises and off premises if you prefer that way of speaking about it.

Either way, IBM owns the gear and manages it, and this is an important distinction. The cloud version of PowerVS is for customers who want flexible consumption of compute and storage capacity with no minimum commitment and no complex contract and who do not want to invest in datacenter space and pay for energy for either all of their capacity or an incremental portion of it. The private version of PowerVS is aimed at customers who have their own data security or data sovereignty issues or who have low latency needs for transactions and are too far away from an IBM Cloud region to deploy applications and databases from there. Either way, the same user experience is now available, using the same control plane and management tools and, as much as possible, the same pricing and consolidated on one bill. This is truly new, and unique among the system vendors we track.

The big difference is that the on premises PowerVS (which has managed services overlaid by default) has set configurations and a minimum monthly payment that is leveled up at the end of each month. Conti says that most PowerVS private customers will commit to spend a base amount over a three-year or five-year term, which makes it predictable for both Big Blue and its PowerVS customers.

“Both types of PowerVS have flexible consumption,” says Conti. “They are both fully metered and the metering is essentially the same between the two of them. We meter on compute, storage and memory, and then the difference is the committed monthly spend at the client site. We are using Power10 machines for this offering – so, you know, Power S1020, Power S1022s, Power E1050s, and Power E1080s, and I’m not going to call them T-shirt sizes, but we have got flexible configurations of small and medium sizes. The smallest one goes down to five servers, which is a sizable starting point. With each one of them, you can configure storage and memory, with certain configuration options. But you don’t have full choice on everything.”

Here are the feeds and speeds for the small pods, which are based on multiple Power S1022 and Power E1050 servers:

And again here are the medium pods based on multiple racks of Power S1022, Power E1050, and Power E1080 servers:

Here are some new charts that make it a little easier to see how the PowerVS private iron is configured:

The interesting bit here is that it takes IBM 30 days to go from order to build, deliver, and activate the PowerVS private pods. We also see that the FlashSystem 5200 and 9500 all-flash arrays are being used as the local storage for the private pods.

This companion chart also is a bit easier to read than the tables in the original May 21 announcement tables above, although the print is pretty small for those of us who have stared at the screens for decades:

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 started taking orders for these fully managed PowerVS private pods back on May 21, but the big news this week is that they are actually available starting on October 8. PowerVS private is available in the United States, Canada, the Netherlands, Denmark, Austria, Germany, Belgium, Luxembourg, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and Australia.

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