In October,CRN hosted international visitor Jim Wasko, vice-president of Open Systems Development at IBM and all-round expert on Linux and open standards. Wasko was in Australia to discuss some of the initiatives that Big Blue has in place to drive sales of its Power platform and to foster a community around Linux on Power software developers.
There were three stops on the two-day tour – first a breakfast and lunch event in Sydney and finally a roundtable in Melbourne (pictured). Local resellers and independent software vendors had a chance to catch up with the vendor’s plans.
Wasko spoke about the IBM’s $1 billion investment in Linux on Power as well the vendor’s part in the Open Power Foundation, a consortium of technology companies focused on developing on top of the platform. He was joined by Wes McDonald, general manager, Systems and Technology Group at IBM Australia and New Zealand and other colleagues from IBM Australia and Avnet Technology Solutions.
The discussions spanned several hours of presentations and a Q&A, which we have boiled down to five key points.
IBM’s Linux journey
As a dyed-in-the-wool Linux and open source advocate, Wasko has spent much of his career around the Linux community. He joined IBM when it acquired the company he worked for, Sequent Computers Systems, and was immediately focused on IBM’s Linux efforts.
“In late 1999, we made a strategic decision that Linux wasn’t just a fad or a hobby operating system but was going to be an industry game changer. That’s when our Linux Technology Centre was born,” said Wasko.
He admitted the vendor had learned how to work with the Linux community though trial and error. “We learned a lot, made a lot of mistakes, we joined some communities and said, ‘We’re here, and we’re going to show you how to do this’.
“That was the first mistake and that isn’t how you work in open-sourced communities. You learn what their norms are, you learn what the rules are and then you join it and then you do some of the dirty work, fix defects, do documentation.
“In the very early years, we made printing sub-systems work, because they were pretty weak in the data centre for Linux at that time.”
The perfect storm
This year, IBM sold its System X commodity server business to Lenovo. Now Big Blue is squarely focused on its Power platform. Wasko conceded that this is not the first time IBM has made a vocal push behind Linux on Power. But he stressed that this time around, there is “a perfect storm” in the market that should drive uptake.
This was an intersection of pull factors, with clients demanding open standards, and push factors as IBM throws its weight behind Linux on Power.
“If you have watched IBM for a long time, people will say, ‘Didn’t you do PowerLinux kick-offs five years ago? And then three years ago? And now you’re doing it again. What’s different this time?’
“What’s different is the market is really looking for more choices. They’re looking for a place to collaborate and we’re now at the point where we are ready to do that now at the silicon level. So we hit this perfect storm, where we’re ready, the market is ready and this is a good collaboration sandbox.”
McDonald agreed: “We are seeing some profound shifts in the market globally, to which IBM is responding very aggressively with some big plays, some big investments. We mentioned the billion-dollar investment in Linux on Power. IBM is backing that up with a further $3 billion investment around chip design and development, and we’re doing this fundamentally to help ISVs [independent software vendors] adopt the technology that we’re bringing to market in a way that is open, available and ultimately offers value to your clients.
“We think these investments, coupled with the success of the Power platform and in particular the progress around the adoption of Open Power and the Open Power Foundation provides a perfect storm of opportunity really from 2014 into 2015 for the market and for our ISV community.
“We think the end result will be that Power becomes a mainstream Linux platform. We think the market needs an alternative. We’re seeing that through a range of interactions and feedback from clients, ISV community, all the way through the entire ecosystem,” added McDonald.
Billion-dollar investment
In September 2013, IBM revealed an initiative to commit $1 billion towards Linux ecosystem growth on IBM’s Power Systems line of servers.
At the Australian tour, Wasko talked about how it was being spent. IBM operates a global network of Power Systems Linux Centres, spaces for software developers to build and deploy applications based on open technology building blocks using Linux and the latest Power technology. The money is also going to the “Linux on Power development cloud”. ISVs, channel partners and customers can access this service for free, using it to prototype, build, port, and test Linux applications on the Power platform.
Wasko explained: “We have five Power Systems Linux Centres spread throughout the world helping people to migrate over. While the team that I manage is actually the engineering and technology team, writing the kernel code that runs on Power, these folks [at the Power Systems Linux Centres] work up a level, really in the application space.
“We have a Power Development Cloud for developers as well as for ISVs. We do the ISV stuff through our PartnerWorld Portal. If you’re registered through PartnerWorld, you can actually get access to a free instance and work your applications on that.”
Avoiding corrupt data, and migrating from Intel
The only thing worse than losing data is corrupting data, said Wasko. “When you lose it, you don’t trust it, because it’s gone, but if it’s corrupt and you don’t know it, you can use that data and make a bad decision. So [corruption] is the worst thing you could ever do to data.”
With Power 8, IBM has tried to remove any concerns from developers about data corruption when converting their applications from Intel to Power.
Wasko talked about ‘Endianness’, which is “the byte order in which things are stored and memory are on disk”.
“The Intel architecture has always been Little Endian, in which the least significant bit is stored first. The mainframes are all Big Endian architectures, where the most significant bit is what’s stored first. Why is that important? At an application level, it’s usually not, but if you have petabytes of data, how do you go through and check all of that data to make sure it’s not Endian-sensitive? How can you convert it and know that when it’s done, you haven’t missed anything? The only thing worse than losing data is corrupting data.
“Some people we were approaching were saying, ‘That conversion is just too risky’. Since at least Power 5, [Power] has been a bi-Endian chip. It has the ability to run in Big Endian mode or Little Endian mode – we just never exploited the Little Endian. The only thing that ever touched that part of the circuitry was a hardware exerciser.
“But as we were working with members of the Open Power Foundation, we asked, ‘How important is this to you?’ and it was very high. So my team went and converted Linux from Big Endian to Little Indian. Ubuntu 1404, which is in the market, is Little Endian only. Solaris 12, which is coming out in this quarter, is Little Endian. So for those who cared about porting and Endianness, we removed that as an obstacle,” said Wasko.
Open Power Foundation and Google
IBM is a founding member of the Open Power Foundation, a technical community that enables “collaborative development and opportunity” around the Power platform.
Why did IBM kickstart the foundation? “A couple of years ago, myself and a couple of folks in our Power brand said, ‘We’ve made a history for ourselves in high-end Unix in mainframes and then the x86 business and storage, but there’s this emerging space and we’re not good with Power in clouds in that kind of scale-out environment. We need to be good at it and we need to be good at it really quickly’.”
There are now more than 50 members of the foundation, but Wasko mentioned one in particular as evidence of the interest in Linux on Power – Google.
“If you think back three years ago, I can’t think of a single case where Google got on stage to back any vendor or any technology. They’ve always been very secretive about that. It’s just their MO. The real secret stuff, the really cool technology, they don’t talk about. But the industry did reach a point, them included, where they felt constrained by a single chip vendor and the lack of the ability to influence that innovation.”
-1.jpg&w=100&c=1&s=0)
.png&w=100&c=1&s=0)
