Services equipment

Hi everyone again! In today’s post, we are going to introduce the devices that we will use in our data center to implement our solution in terms of services. Always focused on our case study, a financial entity, we need to consider that the devices will have to process big amount of data with a high performance. Based on the products offered by our manufacturer, IBM, we opted for a concrete server. The IBM Power System S822LC, the device is designed for industry applications and big data with a superior performance and offers a high level of reliability, serviceability and availability. These characteristics adjust to the demands of our case. As we saw in older posts, virtualization in essential in order to maximize the performance of the machine’s resources, separate services and provide high availability by replicating content. IBM also provides a virtualization solution for their servers, PowerVM, it is compatible with IBM Power Systems. PowerVM provides a secure and scalable server virtualization environment and permits building a dynamic infrastructure, reducing costs, managing risk, and improving service levels. We list some of the characteristics that define this solution:

• Supports multiple operating systems in one system.
• Maximum of 1000 VMs per server.
• Up to 20 VMs per processor core, this provides additional flexibility.
• Resources dynamically shared between VMs.
• Shared processor pools thus reducing licensing costs.
• Shared storage pools, permits reduce SAN infrastructure costs.
• Provides optimum resource utilization.

The Power Hypervisor separates and dispatches the physical system resources with the logical partitions and provides a security layer between them. Also, controls hardware I/O interrupts and management facilities for partitions. There are three types of partition provided by PowerVM:

• Dedicated Logical Partition: Resources dedicated to be used by the partition
• Dynamic Logical Partition: Dynamically redefine all available system resources to reach the optimum capacity
• Micro-Partitioning: Allows you to allocate fractions of processors to a logical partition.

These are a basic view of the solutions of our provider that we choose. I hope it has been of your interest. See you in further posts!