Ubuntu and POWER8: the best of both worlds

by Canonical on 13 June 2014

Last month at IBM Impact we were privileged to showcase the work we’ve been doing to bring Ubuntu to the new POWER8 platform.

The wait is finally over, and IBM POWER machines are now available to the general public. So what does this mean for Ubuntu users?

First of all, the same exact qualities you expect of Ubuntu Server and Cloud are now available on POWER8. The entire archive has been ported to POWER8, which means that the tools and packages you have learned are immediately available. You can find images for Ubuntu for POWER8 alongside our other supported platforms.

Bringing Ubuntu to POWER8 was only the first step; the strength and breadth of our partner ecosystem is one of the reasons that make Ubuntu so appealing to a wide range of users. And everything in that ecosystem is now available on POWER8:

• MAAS support for PowerKVM to allow you to build your own bare metal clusters. Support for BMC autodiscovery and configuration is currently in progress.
• OpenStack Icehouse support.
• Fully manage POWER8 instances from within your existing Landscape deployment.
• Dedicated resources for developers to build on POWER, including Launchpad PPA builder support for software projects that want to build on POWER.

And of course, the Juju Charm Store, which will let you deploy workloads and clusters right onto the metal for real big data solutions.

We’re also excited to bring popular solutions like Nagios, nginx, and HAProxy to POWER8:

“Millions of users worldwide – across every vertical and horizontal sector – choose Nagios to ensure systems, applications, services, and business processes are functioning properly across their entire infrastructure. We were elated when Canonical came to us for inclusion in the Juju Charm Store and look forward to what the future has in store for users of Nagios, Ubuntu, and IBM POWER8 machines.” – Ethan Galstad, Founder and President of Nagios Enterprises

“More of the top 10,000 busiest websites choose NGINX than any other solution to achieve unprecedented speed and scale. We’re looking forward to the combination of NGINX, Ubuntu and IBM POWER8 to accelerate this outstanding performance even further. ” – Paul Oh Head of Business Development Nginx, Inc.

“Web site owners constantly seek seamless scalability, high reliability, and a transparent infrastructure which optimizes their costs without requiring specific skills. By using HAProxy on IBM’s Power 8 systems running Linux, they can get an affordable load balancing solution at all performance levels with the degree of reliability and ease of use that the most demanding enterprise users expect. Our commitment to continuously focus on achieving the highest reliability and the best performance with the lowest resource usage is emphasized by the platform’s unparalleled I/O bandwidth and performance per core which allows our solution to achieve in pure software a level of performance that others may usually only reach using dedicated hardware. This results in the lowest possible costs for a complete load balancing solution in a cloud environment where resource usage is a critical metric.” — Willy Tarreau, author of HAProxy

While we have some impressive solutions already, we’ll be working with IBM over the summer to bring even more valuable workloads to you, so expect Hadoop, ElasticSearch, and many more to land.

Ready to get started? You can start playing with IBM POWER8 machines today on PDP and SiteOx; then head over to Juju to learn how to get your software into people’s hands, thereby increasing your adoption rates and making your solutions accessible to everyone.