An overview of the latest exciting news and direction from the IBM Power team.

A recent blinded internal survey of IBM Power client CIOs, CTOs, IT directors, IT admins and developers tells us that their top business strategies revolve around improving business processes in real-time—using technology in more innovative ways to gain a competitive advantage and better secure their information. [1] Other major objectives include ensuring superior total cost of ownership, improving the performance of their systems, increasing automation for more productivity and enhancing the energy efficiency of data centers.

It is well known (but worth reiterating) that IBM Power is designed for mission-critical workloads that require superior availability, reliability, security and performance. In other words, it’s the engine that fuels our clients’ businesses.

Building off a strong year fueled by Power10 innovation, we are doubling down on our commitment to help companies modernize with this powerful engine in 2023. We will do this in an agile fashion throughout the year by unlocking speed and innovation with frictionless hybrid cloud experiences delivered in new and enhanced flexible consumption models, mitigating risk for business resilience with cloud controls and data protection optimized for the most highly regulated industries, and helping to save cost with increasingly more energy-efficient systems. 

Furthermore, we owe it to our clients and partners to demonstrate that we hear where they need the most help and want the most innovation. To that end, we are prioritizing our focus and investments in 2023 across four critical areas to accelerate our clients’ digital transformation imperatives. I am excited to share those below, in addition to multiple significant capabilities and innovations for this quarter that our clients and partners can begin to benefit from.

Innovate key capabilities for core business workloads

In 2023, we are committed to continue to strategically invest in three operating environments on IBM Power: AIX, IBM i and Linux.

For example, we just rolled out the availability of Hyper Protect Crypto Services for AIX and Linux on Power Virtual Server. IBM Cloud Hyper Protect Crypto Services is a 3-in-1 solution that provides enterprises with the following:

A single-tenant, hybrid cloud key management service
A Hardware Security Module (HSM) in the cloud
Multicloud key orchestration with Unified Key Orchestrator (a part of Hyper Protect Crypto Services)

IBM Cloud Hyper Protect Crypto Services enables clients to control their cloud data encryption keys (DEKs) and Cloud Hardware Security Module. Built on LinuxONE technology, the service runs on a secured enclave so that no one—including cloud administrators—can access another user’s keys.

Separately, to help small-to-midsize clients running core workloads on Oracle Database Standard Edition 2 (SE2) maximize their investments, we are rolling out a 24-core dual chip module on IBM Power S1014. With the S1014 running Oracle Database SE2, clients can take advantage of best-in-class reliability and security [2], and reduce total application cost per database instance by up to 33% compared to Intel’s 4th Generation Xeon Scalable Processors, which can lead to a reduction in the overall number of servers needed to improve sustainability. [3]

Grow with SAP HANA on Power

With end-to-end security, maximal uptime and reliability including more than 99.999% availability, 2x better memory RAS than generally-available 2666-3200MHz DIMMs [4], and up to 2.5x better per-core performance than compared x86 servers [5], IBM Power continues to excel in running SAP HANA workloads greater than 6TB for clients’ infrastructure needs. When Bosch moved its SAP solutions to Power10 from Power9, it saw a 20% reduction in energy use and up to 75% performance improvement. 

To support small- and medium-sized businesses, in particular, IBM is growing our SAP HANA on Power10 offering by now making high-performance, scalable 2-6 TB bundles available, along with added-value services to address our clients’ workload requirements.

The entire Power10 portfolio—all of which is now supported for SAP HANA, including its 2-socket and mid-range servers—now also includes Live Partition Mobility with virtual persistent memory. This feature is designed to reduce downtime by dynamically moving SAP workloads between systems while also enabling fast SAP HANA restart.  

Leading the market with SAP HANA OLAP scalable instances at 40TB [6], IBM Power is designed to support companies’ workloads throughout their entire growth journeys. Moreover, IBM Technology Lifecycle Services provides support and services across the solution lifecycle. This includes design and deployment services to help clients implement flexible virtualization and capacity management to support business requirements and SAP KPIs, proactive support for issues resolution and prevention, and optimization services to enable clients to analyze and tune SAP HANA on Power, storage and software for optimized performance.

Banking and industry modernization

Today, an architecture based on open hybrid cloud offers financial institutions the flexibility necessary for business innovation and improved client experiences, while also addressing security and cost concerns.

One way we are helping banks and financial organizations to accelerate their digital transformations is by expanding on our 20+ year partnership with Temenos Group AG, a leading financial software provider.[7] Soon, clients will be able to modernize their Temenos Transact core banking workloads utilizing Red Hat OpenShift on Power10. Together, Temenos Transact running on IBM Power10 with Red Hat OpenShift lays the foundation for financial institutions to innovate with increased speed and agility, quickly meet the challenge of disruptive competition, get ahead of cybersecurity threats and even address energy usage.

To further support our clients’ modernization journey with hybrid cloud and drive increased productivity and agility, we have partnered with IBM Consulting to offer services to update, migrate and operate Temenos Transact core banking on IBM Power with Red Hat OpenShift as a SaaS-like OPEX solution on-premises for clients. 

Greater flexibility with subscription services and Power as a Service

As the skills gap continues to leave IT teams short-staffed, we are implementing modern development practices and tools to the overall IBM Power application lifecycle.

In an effort to offer businesses more flexibility, our application development and modernization tool IBM i Modernization Engine for Lifecycle Integration (MERLIN) is now available as a subscription offering to help streamline ERP. When building applications on IBM i with MERLIN, developers can access automated conversion of fixed-format to free-format RPG, built-in security protocols, and modern development processes and widely available industry tools such as Git and Jenkins. MERLIN lays the foundation for faster provisioning, modernized applications, reduced time to market and a single DevOps pipeline. This is the first of many new flexible consumption, subscription and as a Service capabilities we plan to deliver this year.

Get started with IBM Power

I am more confident than ever in the ability of IBM Power to help our clients reach their business goals. The 2023 story I have outlined includes the ingredients necessary to accelerate their modernization efforts. These are only some of the early 2023 capabilities we will be delivering this year. I look forward to sharing many more exciting updates throughout 2023.

Statements regarding IBM’s future direction and intent are subject to change or withdrawal without notice and represent goals and objectives only.

[1] Source: IBM Brand Strategy & Market Insights, October 2022 Infrastructure Buyer Behavior Study

[2] Based on the 2022 ITIC Global Server Hardware Reliability Report: https://www.ibm.com/downloads/cas/VQ5B65YZ

[3] Based on IBM Power S1014 24-core server with Dual Chip Module Power10 processor and 192 threads compared to Intel 4th Generation Xeon Scalable Processor with 64 cores at 2 threads per core and 128 total threads: https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/232397/intel-xeon-gold-6438n-processor-60m-cache-2-00-ghz.html; Intel processors with 4 XCC are not eligible for Oracle Database SE2, just MCC, so the maximum core count Intel can offer is 32 cores per socket in a 2-socket system, so 64 cores in total: https://cdrdv2-public.intel.com/710132/Intel_Server_System_M50FCP2UR_TPS_Rev1_0.pdf; Based on $17,500 per Oracle Database SE2 processor: https://www.oracle.com/assets/technology-price-list-070617.pdf; Oracle Database SE2 may only be licensed on servers that have a maximum capacity of 2 sockets. In addition, notwithstanding any provision in your Oracle license agreement to the contrary, each Oracle Database SE2 may use a maximum of 16 CPU threads at any time: https://www.oracle.com/assets/databaselicensing-070584.pdf    

[4] Based on IBM’s internal analysis of the IBM product failure rate of DDIMMS vs generally available 2666-3200MHz DIMMs

[5] SPECInt Math: (Power10 2170 peak /120 core)/(1620 peak/224 cores)=2.5 Max System SPECint IBM Power E1080 (3.55-4,0 GHz, Power10) 120 Cores, 8 CPUs SPECint Score 2170 per CPU Score 271.25 per Core Score 18.08 Date: As of Sept 2, 2021. Max System SPECint Hewlett Packard Enterprise Superdome Flex 280 (2.90 GHz, Intel Xeon Platinum 8380H) 224 Cores, 8 CPUs Intel Xeon Platinum 8380H Speed 2900 Mhz SPECint Score 1620.00 per CPU Score 202.50 per Core Score 7.23 Date: Feb-2021 Link: CPU2017 Integer Rate Result: Hewlett Packard Enterprise Superdome Flex 280 (2.90 GHz, Intel Xeon Platinum 8380H) (test sponsored by HPE) (spec.org)

[6] The maximum of 40TB for OLAP workload must not be exceeded. Scale Up Capacity: SAP Note: 2188482: https://launchpad.support.sap.com/#/notes/2188482

[7] Source: Gartner, Inc., “Magic Quadrant for Global Retail Core Banking,” Vittorio D’Orazio and Don Free, February 09 2022

Infoview Systems Launches Lightweight CDC for IBM i

February 13, 2023

Alex Woodie

IBM i shops that have a need to extract the latest transactions hitting their Db2 for i database for downstream CRM, analytics, or fraud detection use cases may want to check out the new change data capture (CDC) offering unveiled recently by Infoview Systems. When coupled with a streaming data platform like Apache Kafka, CDC opens up new possibilities.

Infoview Systems is a longtime IBM i product and services firm based in Michigan with a global customer base. The company has been active in the data and application integration space for years, first with the sale and implementation of message queuing systems like WebSphere MQ and webMethods for IBM i customers, and more recently with the new generation of event-based messaging middleware, such as Apache Kafka and MuleSoft.

A company recently came to InfoView with a need to pull transactions off its IBM i ERP system to send to an e-commerce system for processing. The customer wanted to minimize overhead on the IBM i system by extracting the transactions from the database as soon as they were written, and moving them into a cloud-based database serving the e-commerce application.

Infoview assessed the various CDC offerings from major vendors on behalf of the customer, says Dmitriy Kuznetsov, vice president of integration and cloud solutions at Infoview. Unfortunately, none of the CDC offerings on the market could support the customer’s requirement.

A big technical hurdle to overcome was the fact that the customer was running a very old system with a denormalized table structure that contained upwards of 1,000 records per file, Kuznetsov says.

“It had everything – addresses, customer balances, all kinds of information about customers in the single table,” he tells IT Jungle. “What they needed is to expose is just a small subset of that information.”

Unfortunately, the existing CDC solutions were ill-equipped to handle the customer’s needs. They took an “all or nothing approach,” Kuznetsov says, requiring the customer to replicate the entire record, adding additional network bandwidth and extra heavy lifting.

“There are a few other CDC solutions that are available,” he says. “But they felt that the solutions were either too complex or too expensive or too inflexible when it comes to configuring them just to include a subset of columns, a subset of tables, and having better control over how and where those changes would flow.”

That was the primary motivation behind Infoview’s decision to build its own CDC product, he says. The company developed the offering, tested it on the customer, and now it’s ready to began marketing it more widely.

InfoCDC, as the product is called, is developed in native RPG, along with SQL. It works by monitoring IBM i journals, detecting changes that match the specified criteria, and then streaming it through IBM i data queues to Kafka, MuleSoft, or any other suitable integration platform.

“It is our own IP,” Kuznetsov says. “We built it from ground up, all the logic. But of course, it uses standard IBM i technology. We’ll listen for journal entries using the receive journal entry command, and we just created our exit programs for that and the whole management piece around it.”

The main selling point to InfoCDC is that the product takes a more lightweight approach to CDC than other products on the market from vendors like IBM and Informatica, Kuznetsov says.

“Other products are very comprehensive, and they indeed support use cases where you have hundreds of tables, multiple libraries,” he says. “You can automatically discover and replicate all these tables, all this data to external databases.”

In addition to giving users more options to filter which records they want to capture and push through the data queue to the integration middleware, InfoCDC is also easier to use.

“You don’t have to be PhD in that product,” Kuznetsov says. “It’s basically a plug-in solution. And it’s relatively inexpensive.”

The InfoCDC offering sports a basic greenscreen interface. The company plans to continue developing the solution by adding more components and connectors that make it more of an “end to end” solution, including possibly a REST API.

As a services company, Infoview Systems is also more than happy to help integrate InfoCDC for IBM i shops. The company, which has about 50 workers, employs experts who can help set up the middleware environment, whether it’s open source Apache Kafka, Confluent Cloud, MuleSoft, or Kafka running on AWS or Microsoft Azure.

Once the InfoCDC product is configured and it’s pulling the latest real-time data out of Db2 for i and loading into a Kafka topic, it can be piped just about anywhere. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of pre-built connectors for source and target systems available via Kafka Connect. When the business use case requires the freshest data be available, this is the fastest way to get there, Kuznetsov says.

“Streaming is the method for delivering all these numerous events from IBM i,” he says. “The use case is typically present themselves in a way that is almost like there is no alternative. So if you need some sort of messaging infrastructure and you find that traditional, legacy MQ-based solutions are not scaling well or getting too expensive, the operational overhead is larger, and maybe they’re not as nimble when it comes to adding new channels, supporting new event stream – that’s where companies realized that Kafka is a leader in that space.”

For more information on InfoCDC and its other products, check out the company’s website at www.infoviewsystems.com.

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