IBM Power Flex

Flex Capacity Upgrade on Demand, working in conjunction with IBM PowerVM™ Live Partition Mobility, can help you maintain application availability more affordably during any planned maintenance activities on a Power Flex system. Up to four times per year you may request temporary enablement of inactive resources on one Power Flex system to support planned maintenance activities on another. In essence, while virtual processor and memory resources are not being used on a system that is being maintained, their equivalent capacity may be deployed elsewhere in the interim.

Any resources activated on one Power Flex system in support of planned maintenance on another are to be deactivated within seven days. Advanced Planning Event capacity (key) requests to the Power CoD Project Office require a minimum of two business days to ensure receipt of the activation and deactivation codes for capacity prior to the start of planned maintenance activities.

You can also deploy IBM PowerHA™ SystemMirror with Power Flex systems to help maintain application availability even in the event of unplanned outages. Business-critical applications are first configured in a cluster utilizing two or more Power Flex systems. Subsequently, if a significant failure were to occur on one Power 795 system, PowerHA SystemMirror could roll critical applications to another Power Flex system and automatically enable as many On/Off CoD processors as needed to keep the business running with minimal loss of service.

Flex Capacity Upgrade on Demand processor and memory activations on a Power Flex system may be temporarily rebalanced between Power Flex systems within the same enterprise and country. Each Power 795’s Flex CUoD resources are the processor and memory activations above 25 percent of its total capacity, and these resources may be rebalanced up to 12 times per year, allowing them to execute on another Power Flex system in the same pool to support changing capacity requirements.

Unique to the Power Flex environment, re-balancing capacity may be activated on a target system prior to the capacity being de-activated on its donor system, to better facilitate the transition of applications from one system to another. As resources on one system are activated, corresponding resources are to be deactivated on the donating system within seven days.

Rebalanced processor and memory activation resources are not permanently moved to another system; rather, they are temporarily allowed to execute on any system within the same Power Flex capacity pool, while being retained on their original system for inventory and maintenance purposes. Power Flex merely allows clients to make use of these Flex CUoD resources on more than a single system. Any rebalanced activations are to be reconciled with inventory records in the event the system is upgraded or sold and must be returned to the original system upon any lease termination.

Requests for Flex Capacity Upgrade on Demand activation and deactivation keys are initiated via email to the Power CoD Project Office at least two business days in advance of rebalancing activity.

Each Power Flex system also ships with an initial quantity of included On/Off Capacity on Demand processor days (approximately 60 days of the inactive resources on each purchased Power Flex 64/128-core system, or 960 days per 32-core processor book). These On/Off processor days are enabled using the normal Capacity on Demand resource enablement process and contracts. The On/Off processor days are credited to your account upon completion of initial CoD and Power Flex contracts and may be used at your discretion to provide utility computing for short-term projects, workload spikes—or to provide automated application availability support via PowerHA SystemMirror.

A Power Flex infrastructure can deliver unprecedented performance, capacity and seamless growth for your UNIX®, IBM System ® and Linux® applications today and into the future. Flex Capacity Upgrade on Demand provides new options for resource sharing in support of large-scale workload consolidation and changing business and application requirements. Employing the strength and innovation of the IBM Power 795 server, PowerVM virtualization and Capacity on Demand technology, Power Flex can enable your organization to more affordably deploy applications across two to four enterprise systems to enhance application availability, while at the same time allowing vital virtual processor and memory resources to be deployed precisely where you need them—dynamically adjusting capacity and even reallocating it beyond the boundaries of a single Power 795 system.