This week IBM hosted the IBM Enterprise2013 conference in Orlando Florida to share our thoughts about future directions for Power Systems, System z and storage. I had the opportunity to share our plans and visions for Software Defined Environment (SDE) on Power Systems using PowerVC.
I spoke to many clients who were genuinely excited at the new direction IBM has chosen for Power Systems virtualization management PowerVC represents a seminal change in our approach to management – a new approach that will leverage our collaboration with the burgeoning OpenStack community. We believe that building on OpenStack will enable our clients to exploit the unique capabilities of Power Systems in their cloud environments and to provide IBM with an extensible platform for the future.
Cloud management on Power Systems is a layered management stack that includes the HMC (and the PowerVM VIOS), PowerVC and SmartCloud offerings. The foundation layer is a new version of the HMC software that provides REST APIs that work with the latest level of the PowerVM VIOS to provide basic virtualization management such as provisioning new virtual machines and virtual networks.
PowerVC provides the next layer in the stack by providing virtual machine image capture and deployment, live mobility, virtual machine monitoring and optimization and virtual machine resilience and availability.
The top levels of the cloud management stack are the SmartCloud products such as SmartCloud Entry. This layer provides for higher-level functions such as self-service provisioning, subscriber and account management and support for deployment of more sophisticated application patterns.
The engineers who are building PowerVC have a relentless focus on making it quick and easy to use. The principal design tenants include simple, fast installation and a configuration designed to get PowerVC up and working in minutes. The design of the graphical user interface focuses on simplicity and progressive revealing of detail for efficient use by new and experienced users. Our user design team has continuously validated our interface design with a select group of early clients to insure that our implementation will meet your expectations.
I am sure that many of you are looking forward to working with PowerVC when it becomes available a little over a month from now. I am excited to be part of the team helping to bring PowerVC and effective cloud management to Power Systems. We are only at the beginning of this journey, but PowerVC will be a new beginning for the cloud on Power Systems.
Links for additional information:
Jay
The secret product manager 
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