Evaluating if Power Virtual Server is a Good Fit for Your Organization’s IBM Power Applications

IBM Power Virtual Server (PowerVS), a cloud infrastructure for IBM Power Systems workloads, is being enhanced with new features to improve resiliency, simplify migrations, and reduce network complexity. As a result, more Power Systems users are beginning their migration to PowerVS.

As a managed services provider with a proven history of supporting IBM environments, FNTS is often asked by organizations whether PowerVS would be a good fit for their IBM Power applications. FNTS clients report three common motivators driving IT leaders to deploy their Power Systems applications and databases on PowerVS.

Organizations prefer the financial flexibility of the cloud.

Pay-for-use and consumption-based pricing models have become the norm for software, and now, IT infrastructure. Therefore, it's understandable that CFOs and procurement teams desire the same flexibility for the infrastructure and applications that run on Power Systems. While not all cloud providers deliver the flexibility to change consumption on demand and pay only for what is used, PowerVS makes this process easier.

Organizations need a more reliable and cost-effective way to ensure business resiliency.

Often referred to as Disaster Recovery (DR), for business-critical workloads that run on Power Systems, it’s really about ensuring the resiliency of your business. When faced with duplicating data centers, infrastructure, and software to ensure resiliency, organizations are increasingly looking to cloud providers to simplify this requirement and reduce cost.

With PowerVS now running in 18 data centers around the world, enabling redundant infrastructure where and when you need it makes PowerVS and IBM Cloud attractive options. This reality is driving more adoption of Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service in the cloud, and it also is leading IT leaders to consider closing data centers entirely when cloud providers like IBM can deliver both the primary and secondary data center services that meet security and compliance requirements.

Organizations lack skills to manage AIX and IBM i workloads on Power Systems.

Many organizations struggle to find skills for AIX and IBM i on Power Systems, but the critical importance of these operating environments remains in organizations, both large and small. Some organizations are drawn to PowerVS with the impression that IBM will alleviate skills challenges by providing day-to-day management of the system after the workloads are migrated to PowerVS. When they discover IBM does not provide important management services such as data backup, fix/patch management, and OS monitoring for PowerVS, they are sometimes disappointed.

FNTS has an offering to meet this need – IBM Power Virtual Server Managed Services. These managed services include OS troubleshooting support, system monitoring, alerting, fix management, configuration, and capacity management. Data backup and disaster recovery services can be provided optionally with the base managed services.

If these benefits intrigue you about PowerVS, I am available to help you evaluate your go-forward options. FNTS offers a free assessment which you can request from our IBM Cloud Catalog or by contacting FNTS.

Keith Zblewski
Product Manager – IBM Hybrid Cloud
FNTS