Partner POV | 4 Ways Red Hat OpenShift is helping IBM Power Systems Clients

Article written by Berjis Patel, Senior Managing Consultant, IBM System Lab Services. 

OpenShift® on IBM Power® Systems takes advantage of hybrid cloud flexibility, enterprise AI, and the security and robustness of the Power platform for private and public clouds. OpenShift is the Red Hat® cloud development platform as a service (PaaS) that enables developers to develop and deploy applications on public, private or hybrid cloud infrastructure. OpenShift 4, its latest version, is an Operator-driven platform that delivers full-stack automation from top to bottom. From Kubernetes to the core services that support the OpenShift cluster to the application services deployed by users, everything is managed throughout its lifecycle with Operators.

4 benefits of Red Hat OpenShift 4 on Power

Red Hat OpenShift on Power Systems can be a building block in your journey to hybrid cloud. It's well known that IBM Power Systems hosts mission-critical workloads and delivers excellent workload performance and reliability across industries. Now you can take advantage of this performance with container workloads using Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform. You can rapidly deploy OpenShift clusters using IBM PowerVC on Power Systems enterprise servers to help modernize your existing workloads.

Here are some of its advantages:

1. Flexibility

OpenShift on Power Systems can be deployed on IBM PowerVM and Red Hat KVM hypervisor, enabling you to use either scale-up or scale-out servers as required. You can also install Red Hat OpenShift bare metal on Power Systems.

2. Performance

Due to the simultaneous multithreading (SMT) technology on Power Systems, it's possible to run more threads per core, which reduces the number of cores in comparison to an x86 system, achieving a 3.2X container density per POWER9 core. Depending on the types of workloads used — for example, a large-scale database, an AI or machine learning application or training modules — there's a significant performance boost when using IBM Power Systems.

3. Better storage ROI

With the invention of IBM PowerVC Container Storage Interface (CSI) driver, you can take advantage of using existing block storage subsystems as persistent volumes for the container world. IBM PowerVC CSI driver bridges the need for persistent storage in a container environment by using your existing storage infrastructure.

Also, with the new addition of IBM Block Storage CSI driver, clients that don't have PowerVC can leverage this CSI driver to directly access their existing IBM storage. The IBM Block Storage CSI driver for IBM Storage systems, can dynamically provision persistent volumes for block or file storage to be used with stateful containers, running in Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform.

The savings is manifested in many ways: new storage purchases and technology and training costs can be reduced or completely avoided.

4. Modernization and the hybrid cloud journey

Modernizing applications has become more critical than ever. Earlier apps can be difficult and costly to maintain, require antiquated or hard-to-find developer skills, and create a maze of disparate platforms that grow in complexity over time. OpenShift is built to help you make the shift to app modernization with greater ease, efficiency and precision. This Kubernetes-based platform enables you to achieve shorter application development cycles to deliver better quality software.

In addition to the many benefits of OpenShift on Power Systems, your journey to hybrid cloud can be further enhanced by IBM Cloud Pak® solutions built on Red Hat OpenShift, such as the Cloud Pak for Multicloud Management, Cloud Pak for Data and Cloud Pak for Applications. Together they provide a complete solution for AI, machine learning and cloud-native application workloads and management.

Red Hat OpenShift running on Power Systems is currently available on premises and in IBM Cloud data centers across the globe, as well as in partner cloud solutions (like Google Cloud and Skytap), to create a great synergy for your hybrid cloud environment. Thus, you now can deploy and manage your applications and services at your data center or in a public cloud. OpenShift's ability to bring IBM Power Systems into the heterogenous container and virtualization environment is focused on hybrid, open cloud architecture and brings harmony to divergent hardware platforms that must coexist to make the business run.