At the end of January, the computing world learned of a somewhat hidden treasure that's no secret to System i users. That's when IBM announced PowerVM, its brand for virtualization technology on all of its Power processor-based systems. PowerVM is possible because of the shared base virtualization technology that has been in place since 2004. It's also an acknowledgement of the growing importance of virtualization to the broader market.

However, System i users have enjoyed the benefits of the technology for years, thanks in part to a strong historical affinity in the minds of customers between System i and mainframes. A majority of today's System i boxes are deployed with logical partitioning and virtualization in place. Ian Jarman, manager of IBM Power Systems Software, cites near total coverage in 570 and 595 systems. "At least 85 percent of them are already deploying partitioning," he says.

Thus, the advent of PowerVM doesn't represent a radical change in the System i world. Jarman notes, though, that enhancements are planned to the virtualization technology. These include the ability to virtualize storage in V6R1 of i5/OS so that one partition can host storage for another as well as support blades. This support is through the use of PowerVM in conjunction with i5/OS on the blade. So anyone deploying i5/OS on a blade in the future will do so via PowerVM.*

There could also be an indirect impact on System i users from new branding. Jarman points out that the i5/OS hypervisor that supervises virtualization is very efficient, a critically important characteristic when many partitions are involved. It also is designed for mission critical applications and often handles vital tasks. What's more, it's deployed in thousands of data centers.

However, the i5/OS and its hypervisor are often not what spring to mind when a chief information officer is asked about virtualization. With the new branding, IBM hopes that attitude will change, which could be an advantage to System i users, sites, and shops. "What we're trying to do behind this is to get people to realize just what the benefits, specifically, of PowerVM are," says Jarman.

As for why System i has enjoyed virtualization technology for longer than System p or other platforms, Jarman says that's a result of the association in the minds of customers between System i and mainframes. From the beginning, customers wanted to put larger workloads on the System i and wanted to use the tools and techniques found on mainframes. Because virtualization was a common mainframe technology, they wanted to see it on what they considered to be the mainframe's little cousin.

The technology came in handy with server consolidation being so in vogue over the last decade. Virtualization allowed customers to manage costs and reduce system footprint, thereby increasing operational efficiency. The downside of virtualization is the risk of creating a single point of failure for multiple servers.

One of the most common ways to handle this real problem is to refrain from consolidating the servers down to one. Instead, data centers will run two or more, dividing the production workload between the systems. A partition on one can then back up the production partition on another. In this way, there's redundancy as well as elimination of the problem.

Stan Staszak, director of System i and System x products for Sirius Computer Solutions [2], a large IBM solutions provider headquartered in San Antonio, Texas, notes that virtualization is common in the System i, largely as a result of it being available for the platform for longer than it has been available for others.

Its widespread adoption in the market didn't come easily, though. Many system i applications have been critical to running businesses so customers have been understandably somewhat conservative when it comes to deploying new technology. That reluctance, however, has been overcome by solid evidence that partitioning is safe, Staszak notes. "We established several years ago that it was a solid technology," he says.

As a result, virtualization was employed when servers were consolidated, and the technology has become commonplace. Staszak estimates that three out of four customers have at least one box in their enterprise running multiple partitions -- thereby utilizing virtualization technology.

So, in some ways, System i users are ahead of the curve when it comes to PowerVM.

* For more detail on virtualization, i5/OS, and blades, check out, "IBM Sharpens BladeCenter with i5/OS." [3]