Since 2020, IBM has been building a rich set of Red Hat Ansible Certified Content for IBM Power, including collections for AIX, IBM i, Linux, VIOS, and HMC. Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform and the Power collections have been broadly adopted by the Power customer base, helping customers to streamline their operations and drive new innovations.
Many IBM Power clients have requested the added convenience of being able to run the full Ansible Automation Platform on the Power platform. Addressing this need, and following the Tech Preview release in June 2023, we are now excited to announce the General Availability (GA) of Ansible Automation Platform on Power. Customers who purchase enterprise subscriptions of Ansible Automation Platform can deploy the full set of components including automation controller and Ansible automation hub on their IBM Power servers, along with the popular set of Red Hat Ansible Certified Module Collections for IBM Power endpoints. Event-Driven Ansible, previously in Dev Preview on Power is also supported as GA, providing event driven automation to schedule jobs and run ad-hoc jobs in response to event notifications coming in from different sources. Ansible Automation Platform customers also have entitlement to the recently announced GA release of Red Hat Ansible Lightspeed with watsonx Code Assistant that brings powerful generative AI features that make it easier to adopt, create, and maintain automation practices.
For full details on the official Red Hat announcement read the Red Hat blog. There is also a blog about IBM Z & LinuxONE support.
Why Ansible Automation Platform for Power?
As digitalization drives technological change, organizations are constantly seeking ways to streamline their operations, improve productivity, and maintain the highest levels of consistency and security. IT executives, development teams, infrastructure, and operations teams are under increasing pressure to support new ways of doing business, to deliver great digital experiences to their customers, and enable innovation. This has led to an enterprise landscape of complex hybrid, multi-cloud environments and a mix of traditional applications running alongside new cloud native application environments based on Kubernetes. The traditional day-1 and day-2 development and operations roles and processes are evolving to embrace Agile development, DevOps, and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE). The resulting technology and process complexity makes it very difficult to manually manage and scale IT development and operations.
IT has boomed since the start of the pandemic however, there is also a shortage of skilled resources. Power resources are no exception and Power customers are facing specialist skills shortages for management and administration of system software and business applications running on AIX, IBM i and Linux. As administrators and operations staff are increasingly stretched, this increases the risk of business down-time from errors introduced by manual system administration updates and changes.
Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform has emerged as a powerful solution for IBM Power customers to meet these challenges. It empowers businesses to automate a wide range of IT tasks, from configuration management to application deployment thus transforming their operations. Ansible Automation Platform seamlessly unites workflow orchestration with configuration management, infrastructure provisioning (including cloud) and application deployment in one easy-to-use platform. It increases efficiency, frees up IT resources, and ends repetitive operations tasks for AIX, IBM i and Linux on Power, including system configuration, security and compliance, cloud provisioning, and deployment of applications and fixes – all while reducing the risk of administrator error.
Why run Ansible Automation Platform on Power?
The key drivers for why IBM Power customers want to run Ansible Automation Platform on Power are:
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Enterprise organizational structure
Power customers rely on the Power platform to run core business applications for the enterprise, with stringent Reliability, Availability and Security (RAS) requirements and SLAs. Reflecting the criticality of these applications to the business, and the heightened compliance requirements, there are often dedicated development and operations teams for managing the Power based applications and infrastructure. For these teams having the Ansible Automation Platform run on the Power platform, helps to keep everything together in the same domain, provides a greater level of visibility and control over the automation and security and brings administration of the platform itself and development of new automation into the same environment.
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Enhanced security
Software supply chain attacks—which can cause both financial and reputational damage—are becoming more frequent:
- In the past 3 years, the average annual number of software supply chain attacks has gone up 742%1
- 45% of organizations will experience supply chain attacks by 20252
- Compromises of software supply chains account for 1 in 5 data breaches3
- Ransom payments for attacks are increasing 71% year-over-year4
Ansible Automation Platform can help enterprises protect against such attacks and uses playbooks, local directory services, consolidated logs, and external applications to integrate IT security teams and automate their security solutions. Ansible Playbooks can incorporate encryption, key management, and secure credential handling, so sensitive information remains protected while the Ansible Automation Platform itself is enterprise-hardened with 24x7 support.
Power’s strong security and resistance to supply chain attacks is a key reason that many of the world’s largest enterprises choose to run their core business applications on the platform. The Power Systems architecture and software security solutions from IBM together provide a strong defense against ever evolving threats. Running the Ansible Automation Platform on Power brings the combination of a highly secure platform with a secure automation framework for implementing enterprise automation.
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Reliability, sustainability and other benefits
In addition to the above, Enterprises can enjoy other benefits from deploying Ansible Automation Platform on Power Platform. In the latest ITIC Global Reliability Survey Power and Z delivered the highest reliability for the 15th consecutive year with an 88% majority of the IBM Power10 server users achieving “8 9’s” of uptime. As automation becomes a key part of an enterprises Day-2 IT operations, Power brings the reassurance of rock-solid reliability to make sure that automation itself is always on.
Having a highly resilient system also drives greater sustainability leading to less downtime and fewer redundant components and systems. IBM Power10 processor-based servers offer a truly “green” system from end-to-end for Ansible Automation Platform and other enterprise applications.
Conclusion
Ansible Automation Platform is a game-changer for Power customers looking to optimize their IT operations. Its simplicity, scalability, and support for Infrastructure as Code are just a few of the advantages that make it an invaluable tool. Ansible development itself is now greatly accelerated by Red Hat Ansible Lightspeed with watsonx Code Assistant generative AI and purpose built Ansible specific IBM Granite model. With full support to run all components of the Ansible Automation Platform on Power, Power administration and DevOps teams have greater control over their automation environment. As technology continues to evolve, automation with Ansible Automation Platform on Power will become increasingly essential in maintaining efficiency, security, and innovation. Embracing Ansible Automation Platform on Power can help your organization become leaner, more agile, and more productive in the digital age.
Learn more
To learn more about Ansible Automation Platform on Power check out these great resources:
And, be sure to register to attend our upcoming webinar on Jan 16, 2024 at 1:00 PM EST, Accelerate Automation with IBM Power. If you can't attend the live session, register to watch the replay.
Sources
- “8th Annual State of the Software Supply Chain.” Sonatype.com, Aug. 2023.
- Moore, Susan. “7 Top Trends in Cybersecurity for 2022.” Gartner, Aug. 2023.
- “Fight back against data breaches.” IBM. 1 August 2023.
- Olson, Ryan. “Average Ransom Payment Up 71% This Year, Approaches $1 Million.” Palo Alto Networks, June 2023.
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