Power Virtual Servers at IBM TechXchange Conference

Are virtual servers the key to a flexible and resilient IT infrastructure? Host Steven Dickens is Six Five Media In the Booth at IBM TechXchange, joined by IBM‘s Joe Cropper, Distinguished Engineer, Power as-a-Service & Hybrid Cloud, and Anthony Ciccone, Director, Product Management, IBM Power Systems – Cloud Offerings for a conversation on the latest innovations and client experiences with IBM’s Power Virtual Servers (Power VS). See what they have to say about the following: ⤵️

  • An overview of IBM Power servers’ capabilities, including support for AIX, IBM i operating system, and Linux
  • The agility, reliability, and sustainability offered by Power servers to meet organizational needs
  • Insights from Power clients on the growing need for cloud solutions
  • A deep dive into the use cases and benefits of Power Virtual Server (Power VS)
  • Updates and comparisons of Power VS within the competitive landscape

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Transcript

Steven Dickens: Hello and welcome. I’m Steven Dickens, your host, and you’re joining us here for another episode of Six Five coming to you live from IBM TechXchange. I’m joined by Anthony.

Anthony Ciccone: Yes.

Steven Dickens: I’ll get that right, and Joe. Hey guys, welcome to the show.

Anthony Ciccone: Yeah, it’s great to be here. Thank you, Steve.

Steven Dickens: So tell us a little bit about your roles and what you do for IBM.

Joe Cropper: So, I’m an IBM Distinguished Engineer and responsible for all of the-

Steven Dickens: So you’re the brains of the outfit.

Anthony Ciccone: He’s the brains. Yeah.

Steven Dickens: He’s the brains of the outfit.

Joe Cropper: Yeah. So yeah, so I have a full technical responsibility for the Power VS solution and it’s just amazing to get to have fun day in and day out, building what our clients are loving to use.

Steven Dickens: It’s always good when you’re getting to build what clients want, right?

Joe Cropper: Absolutely.

Steven Dickens: And Anthony, your role?

Anthony Ciccone: Yeah, so I am a Director of Product Management for the Azure Service and Cloud Offerings for the IBM Power Division.

Steven Dickens: So guys, we heard in the introductions there and we joked about it, Joe, but I think it’s true. You guys are delivering what customers want with Power VS. What are you hearing from them? I’ll go to you first, Anthony. What are you hearing from them as you engage? The big theme for me is that hybrid cloud, that optionality. Are you hearing the same?

Anthony Ciccone: Yeah, absolutely. And Steve, as you know, we have literally tens of thousands of Power clients out there running hundreds of thousands of systems and many of those clients are looking for ways to transform their businesses with new technologies. Like this week, we’re talking a lot about generative AI and lots of next services.

Steven Dickens: The RPG assistant came out today.

Anthony Ciccone: That’s right.

Steven Dickens: I saw that. I was chatting to Paul on the show. Check that out. But no-

Anthony Ciccone: Absolutely,

Steven Dickens: … you guys are doing some great stuff in that space.

Anthony Ciccone: You bet. And one of the things that Dinesh actually mentioned this morning at the opening keynote is that in order to get maximum value out of generative AI technologies, it’s really important for clients to be able to leverage your existing investments. And so what we are giving-

Steven Dickens: You don’t want to throw everything away, you’ve got to be able to build on that that’s platform-

Anthony Ciccone: That’s exactly right.

Steven Dickens: … of where your data is, where your applications are.

Anthony Ciccone: Exactly. And so what we’re building with Power Virtual Server is a distributed hybrid infrastructure that allows clients to actually leverage those investments but extend them to generative AI and add new capabilities to modernize those applications.

Steven Dickens: So Joe, what are some of those use cases? That makes sense to me. I can see that fitted in that hybrid cloud landscape, but what are you hearing some of those use cases? What are people telling you as they look on this adoption journey?

Joe Cropper: When we set out back in 2019 with Power Virtual Server, we really designed it to be an extension of what our clients are doing on premises. So, kind of very familiar infrastructure to make it easy so that if they want to flip from their data center and move into Power Virtual Server, help them do business continuity, disaster recovery. As Anthony said, application modernization, get the latest access to the latest and greatest hardware, and we wanted to make that easy and make it a comfortable landing zone on the familiar enterprise platform that they’ve been running in their data centers for years. So, that was really what it was all about, is trying to give people a nice soft landing zone and just a logical extension of what they’ve been doing in their data centers.

Steven Dickens: I mean, I think if you can hit the easy button for clients, you’re going to get traction. You guys made some announcements today, we’re coming to you live from the show. What were some of those announcements? I think the key piece for me is that kind of five-year journey with Power VS, but what came through, what were those announcements today?

Anthony Ciccone: Yeah, I’ll summarize a couple of them. The first one that we’ve announced recently is the new private cloud or at-client site capability for Power Virtual Server. And this gives you essentially the best of both worlds. Private cloud gives the client the ability to have IBM basically bring the cloud to their location. And so we will actually build, deliver, install, provision and bring up the environment in their data center. And that gives them maximum flexibility in terms of workload.

Steven Dickens: And that crucial for those clients, focused on sovereignty, they’re focused on where their data, getting extra hands on it, but they don’t want to manage it, right? Is that the way to think about it?

Anthony Ciccone: Exactly right. And many of those clients, they just want to focus on the application tier. They want to focus less on the infrastructure tier.

Steven Dickens: But their data center.

Anthony Ciccone: Exactly, exactly.

Steven Dickens: That’s crucial.

Anthony Ciccone: Yes. And the other side of the offering, if you will, is the public cloud side gives you the maximum flexibility to easily spin up virtual machines and use what you need. And then with the private cloud, you can actually mix and match so you get the best of both worlds.

Steven Dickens: So it’s obviously a competitive landscape. You guys have been in this market, you talked about the tens of thousands of clients. I’m hearing from others about this hybrid story. Where do you guys play? I’ll come to you here, Joe. What are you hearing around the sort of competitive landscape? I think if I look at the power space, you’ve obviously win new workloads with new clients, you’re winning new workloads with existing clients, but also you’ve got that legacy base. What are you seeing as that competitive landscape?

Joe Cropper: Yeah, I mean, if you just take a step back and you look at the power business, obviously one of the things that we pride ourselves on is giving our clients that choice and flexibility in terms of how they can consume. And we’ve got a great ecosystem of partners and lots of options that our clients can pick from. But from an IBM perspective, we’ve got some of that secret sauce as well, as Anthony referred to, with our distributed hybrid infrastructure. We’ve now got the Power VS service. You can consume it at your location, in the IBM data centers. We own the entire stack, top to bottom, everything down from the bare metal up to the hypervisor-

Steven Dickens: It’s crucial I think, we hear it from a security perspective. I hear that more and more, “Who’s got the bios, who’s got the firmware? Where’s the software route of trust on the operating system?” All of those pieces, it’s crucial.

Joe Cropper: Yeah. So, as we own that end to end, we can kind of go in and do some very innovative things, make it secure, scalable, reliable and convenient. And that’s something that if our clients want to also access the broader plethora of the IBM Cloud Enterprise Services, they can come to us and we can help them with all of those things.

Steven Dickens: So if I was a client looking to kind of get started, maybe I’m new to Power, we’ll do that and maybe I’m an existing on-premise customer, how would I get started with Power VS?

Anthony Ciccone: Yes, that’s a great question.

Steven Dickens: That’s what they pay me to. They pay me to ask all the good questions.

Anthony Ciccone: Our goal is actually to make it super easy to get started with Power Virtual Server. And there’s a couple of ways that we do that. The first is we offer promotions, essentially credits so that you can actually try the offering for literally no cost. The second thing that we do is we engage with clients through our center of excellence and we offer them the ability to pilot their workloads, go through essentially a POC with our help.

Steven Dickens: It’s a kind of risk is on-ramp-

Anthony Ciccone: Exactly. It’s a risk-free on-ramp. That’s a great way to think about it. And the third way I’ll say that we help clients get started is that we take some of the risk out of the migration by funding part of that migration and we offer migration assistance programs that we’ve actually extended to partners as well. So, Joe mentioned that we have a growing ecosystem of partners that can help clients move to Power Virtual Server and we make migration assistance available to them as well.

Steven Dickens: So we’re going to start to wrap up. They’ve got a demo for us to go and do.

Anthony Ciccone: That’s right, we want to show it to you.

Steven Dickens: Before we get to that, just quick fire. A couple of points from you, a couple of points from you. What were the key takeaways? You get to pick four, I’ve given you no chance-

Anthony Ciccone: Yeah, no worries.

Steven Dickens: … to elaborate here.

Anthony Ciccone: No worries.

Steven Dickens: But I’ll go to you first, Anthony, what would those takeaways be?

Anthony Ciccone: Absolutely. The takeaway here is that many clients are looking to distribute hybrid cloud infrastructure for a lot of good reasons. And Power Virtual Server is the best landing zone for them. We give you the option to run the workloads either in your own data center or in the public cloud, delivered through our 21 data centers. And you get the same flexibility, the same user experience, regardless of where you want run those applications.

Steven Dickens: That optionality is key. You get another one, you’ve got one more to pick. What would your other point be?

Anthony Ciccone: Let’s see.

Joe Cropper: So, maybe one thing, I’ll just jump in here real quick. I think another key thing is is that clients can ease into this. And what I mean by that is it’s a familiar architecture. I get a lot of those questions from clients like, “Well gee, how am I going to make sure that I’m going to have the similar SLA or performance and IOPS?” Because remember, clients are running their mission-critical workloads here.

Steven Dickens: Yeah, they’re running an SAP workload, they’re running Oracle, they’re running-

Joe Cropper: It’s the crown jewels.

Steven Dickens: Yes. It’s the mission-critical stuff.

Joe Cropper: The key thing to that point is it’s the same Power hardware, the same Power VM hypervisor technology, fiber channel storage. It’s just very familiar. And I think that’s something that we want to make sure all of our clients understand. Very, very familiar in a landing space.

Anthony Ciccone: I’ll just add to that one point, Steve. I think Joe’s on an excellent point. The fact that one of the best things about Power Virtual Servers, it is built from the same enterprise-class servers that customers have been running for decades. And so that means they can move to this hybrid cloud infrastructure without the risk or cost of replatforming those applications.

Steven Dickens: That’s huge. That’s huge. Well, guys, we’ve been talking about it enough. It sounds great.

Anthony Ciccone: How about we go look at it? Let’s go take a look at it.

Steven Dickens: Yeah. How about we go look at it? Let’s go do a demo guys. Guys, we’re going to cut and then we’re going to go have a look at this. Stick with us. So, you heard us talk about it, we’re now going to see it. Joe, walk us through the demo. We talked about optionality, talked about customers wanting to be able to be on-prem, in the cloud combination. Talk us through it.

Joe Cropper: Yeah, so what we’re looking at here, this is the IBM Power Virtual Server home screen when I first come in here-

Steven Dickens: So, this would be what I’d see if I logged onto the console?

Joe Cropper: Exactly. You would come here and this would be your first screen you would come into to create a workspace, which is kind of like a logical folder where you can create virtual machines, your network, subnets, volumes, et cetera. Now notice the first thing you see here is there’s a location type. Remember, you can deploy this and create these in your data center or IBM data center. So here we’ve got the client-

Steven Dickens: So, I just get to pick my deployment location?

Joe Cropper: Yeah, whichever data center. And so in this case you pick client location, here’s all the locations that you would have for your enterprise. This could be your Chicago data center, New York.

Steven Dickens: So these are my data centers that I’m picking out.

Joe Cropper: Yes, precisely. So you pick here. And then similarly, as I mentioned, distributed hybrid infrastructure, you could also pick IBM data centers.

Steven Dickens: So those were my data centers. These are now IBM’s data centers and I can pick?

Joe Cropper: Exactly.

Steven Dickens: Okay.

Joe Cropper: Same interface, same exact experience.

Steven Dickens: That’s seamless, right?

Joe Cropper: Yeah. Yeah. So this is how it all starts. So now once you pick a place to create your workspace, the next logical part is you want to get ready to actually go ahead and create a virtual machine.

Steven Dickens: Is it AIX, is it Linux on Power? What am I picking?

Joe Cropper: Precisely. So in this case, I’m an Oracle administrator. I want to deploy an LPAR for AIX for my Oracle database. Boom. You pick that location, you come in here, we provide a set of out-of-box images for you. Boom, boom, boom. You go through here and you actually go through and do the VM deployment.

Steven Dickens: So Anthony, as you talk to clients, is this simplicity what they’re asking for?

Anthony Ciccone: It’s exactly what they’re asking for. Clients want simplicity and the ability to move power workloads, mission-critical power workloads to cloud with simplicity.

Steven Dickens: Yeah.

Joe Cropper: So, once I get ready to do this, the next step is is that once I’ve deployed a bunch of volumes and VMs-

Steven Dickens: This is the slide, this is the one with the money on it, right?

Joe Cropper: Yeah, the money.

Steven Dickens: This is where I sign the checks over.

Joe Cropper: Somebody’s got to pay the bill for all this stuff.

Steven Dickens: This wasn’t a free service? Geez.

Joe Cropper: So, the beautiful thing about what we’ve done though is all of the billing, so for their financial flow of your organization, we’ve made it simple. They can go to one place to see all of their resources.

Steven Dickens: That’s crucial. I mean, I joke, but that is crucial. Being able to see upfront what I’m going to pay for my workload. What are we? Three clicks into the screen here, and already there’s a level of transparency. That’s crucial.

Joe Cropper: Exactly. So whether you’re deploying workload in your data center, IBM’s data centers, whether you’re consuming other IBM cloud services like Watson X or Cloud Object Storage, et cetera, they can go to this one screen to see everything. And then the financial focus can go in here and see more detail about what they’re spending their money on.

Steven Dickens: So Anthony, is that coming through as you look at the product management piece, that transparency around cost?

Anthony Ciccone: Yeah, it’s crucial. And what I might add is that we offer term discounts. If you are willing to commit to using the product for a year or three years, we’ll give you very attractive discount. Essentially the more you use, the more you save.

Steven Dickens: Yeah, which makes sense.

Joe Cropper: I mean, obviously this is just scratching the surface on what you can do with this.

Steven Dickens: Yeah, we’re just taking a quick look, right?

Joe Cropper: Yeah. But there you have it. I mean, in a few clicks you can pick where you’re going to deploy, easy to deploy your workload once you pick the location. Easy to see your bill all in one single interface. It’s really that easy.

Steven Dickens: I think the key takeaway from that for me was the optionality. There’s not complicated screens of whether I’m on-prem, in the cloud, and then this transparency. I wasn’t expecting it to be this transparent that quickly with the pricing. That’s really good to see. So, you’ve been watching us here at IBM TechXchange. We’ve been diving in with the Power VS team. Really fantastic demo and a great conversation. Click on our other content to check out more and we’ll see you next time. Thank you very much for watching.

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