Word on the street says IBM Power Systems customers are snapping up PowerVM more than ever before (and this includes its predecessor versions that had lousy names). To get a more detailed scoop, Power IT Pro caught up with Ian Robinson, IBM's Power Systems virtualization offering manager for the IBM Systems and Technology Group, for a revealing Q&A.
Q. Can you give us an update on PowerVM? It's come a long way as a separate new product in a short time--and customers seem to have really started embracing it, true?
A. As with Power Systems in general, PowerVM enjoyed remarkable success during 2009, with more than 60% of all new Power Systems shipping with PowerVM installed. In particular, sales of the high-end PowerVM Enterprise Edition increased considerably, indicating that clients are becoming more ambitious with their enterprise virtualization plans, and are seeking to deploy advanced capabilities such as live partition mobility. Also during 2009, IBM launched VMControl, a virtualization management plug-in for IBM Systems Director that complements PowerVM with sophisticated capabilities such as system pools -- or combinations of VMs distributed across multiple physical servers that can be managed as a single entity.
Q. When it comes to competitive UNIX displacements, virtualization plays an important role -- what are a couple of the key areas that PowerVM excels compared to similar virtualization offerings for HP or Sun?
A. PowerVM is technically more advanced than virtualization offerings from HP and Sun, while also delivering scalability, flexibility and performance characteristics that far outpace x86-based virtualization products such as Microsoft Hyper-V or VMware vSphere. Much of the Power Systems sales activity during 2009 was related to clients moving workloads from Solaris/SPARC and HP-UX/Itanium platforms across to IBM Power Systems (running AIX, IBM i, or Linux), and in almost all cases these migrated workloads were virtualized with PowerVM and consolidated onto a far smaller number of servers. The limited virtualization capabilities of HP and Sun cannot match the dynamic resource allocation, extreme scalability, leadership performance, and cross-platform virtualization capabilities of PowerVM.
Q. We should get a new PowerVM update later this year, correct? Anything you can hint at or share right now?
A. The next major release of PowerVM, due to ship later in 2010, will include significant enhancements to the built-in virtual storage and virtual networking capabilities, along with full support for the latest generation of POWER7-based servers and blades -- further extending PowerVM's leadership over virtualization products from HP and Sun.
Q. So let's talk 'Smarter Planet' . . . how does virtualization become essential for supporting the next generation of 'Smarter Planet' applications?
A. IBM's focus on 'Smarter Planet' applications results from the rapid transition of its leading clients towards more intelligent and interconnected workloads that result from the emerging 'Internet of things' -- which is much larger than yesterday's 'Internet of people.' These new workloads generate orders of magnitude more data, transactions, messages, and interactions. When such applications are virtualized, they need to be able to scale dynamically -- up and down -- perform at lightning speed, and be 100 percent available to users. In other words, they require an industrial-strength virtualization solution that is integrated directly into the hardware and can be relied upon to scale seamlessly from the smallest blade to the largest multi-core server. PowerVM meets these criteria far better than any virtualization offering from HP, Sun, or VMware.