New partner integration opportunities were introduced Monday at IBM Edge.

Lynn Haber

September 19, 2016

3 Min Read
IBM Targets Hybrid Sweet Spot with New Cloud-Ready Offers

Lynn HaberFocusing on hybrid cloud, IBM on Monday launched several products that consist of a combination of Power, z Systems, and storage – to enable the flexibility and agility that businesses are demanding.

IBM's Mike Perera“All the products that we announced share a hybrid-cloud flavor and are all about the flexibility of infrastructure,” said Mike Perera, vice president, IBM zSystems software. The announcements were at IBM Edge 2016, being held this week in Las Vegas.

Taking a close look at the three pillars of products:

  • The first is a new class of Power Systems called the C class — C for cloud. They’re flexible, scalable and are integrated with OpenStack-based cloud management tools with built-in capacity and on demand features. “The twist here is that as clients buy capacity for Power– Linux on Power specifically– they’ll now have the ability to deploy that capacity where they want to, meaning they could deploy it in a traditional hardware sense or in the cloud with SoftLayer,” said Perera. This announcement is an extension of what IBM announced in April — Power Linux being supported in SoftLayer. In the latest addition, customers choose where they want to deploy additional capacity.

  • Another Power Systems-related announcement is the expansion of the ecosystem for Linux on Power. This includes new offerings from Red Hat supported on Power, Hortonworks’ Hadoop supported on Power, Power support from NGINX for its load balancer and web accelerator software, as well as for Mirantis’ OpenStack-based cloud management solution.

  • IBM also announced support by Canonical for the Ubuntu OpenStack implementation across both Power and zSystems, and the Linux distributions running on them.

More news around zSystems Monday from IBM includes enabling clients to monitor hybrid applications.{ad}

“Today, if you have an application and some of it runs on Bluemix and some runs on Amazon Web Services (AWS), for example, you don’t really have an end-to-end view of the health of that application. You’ve got a Bluemix view and you’ve got a z view but if something goes wrong – or ideally – before something goes wrong, you need to be able to look end to end for slowdowns or bottlenecks, or where’s the issue that’s going to impact the broader application — there’s no way to do that,” Perera explained.

That’s about to change with …

{vpipagebreak}

… Omegamon for Application Performance Management, which plugs into IBM’s Omegamon Performance Management Suite.

The last zSystems-related news is software-as-a-service (SaaS) support for z and operational analytics, called zSystems Operational Insights. “In this case, we’re using the IBM cloud and Bluemix to create individual insights that not only report on the health of the system but also provide “next steps” addressing needs around clients skills or accelerated best practices. as well as community aspects for benchmarking themselves against other clients in the community,” Perera noted.

Ultimately, there’ll be a marketplace where clients get what they need without having to install, configure and learn new tools.{ad}

Finally, IBM Operational Analytics for zSystems, for anomaly detection, now supports hybrid cloud, giving the user the option of selecting where they want to analyze the data, i.e., on z, Linux on z, Power, or in the cloud, for example. “Customers take the data and export it into [whichever] analytics operational application they’re using, i.e. Splunk, in order to streamline it on an enterprise basis,” said Perera.

On the storage front, IBM on Monday announced IBM Copy Data Management and Protect, which lets users back up data to the cloud, i.e. SoftLayer, Amazon, etc.

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Lynn Haber

Content Director Lynn Haber follows channel news from partners, vendors, distributors and industry watchers. If I miss some coverage, don’t hesitate to email me and pass it along. Always up for chatting with partners. Say hi if you see me at a conference!

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