IBM Power Systems

Consolidate for success

Power Systems continues to support up to three different operating systems simultaneously—IBM AIX, IBM i and Linux (both big-endian and little-endian)—running on the powerful and highly mature IBM PowerVM hypervisor. In practical terms, this means that companies can choose from tens of thousands of enterprise solutions, including a comprehensive range of open source software.

PowerVM enables multiple virtual environments to run efficiently and in complete isolation from each other on the same physical hardware, seamlessly flexing resources up and down to match your changing business objectives. These capabilities mean that you can consolidate multiple mission-critical systems to a single Power server without concerns about security, availability or performance. Built-in software simplifies the management of physical and virtual resources, helping you to control energy usage while ensuring continuous availability for mission-critical applications.

Equally, PowerVM makes it easy to run private or public cloud services, keeping different environments completely separate without introducing an unmanageable administrative overhead. However you choose to take advantage of PowerVM, the ability to mix and match environments translates into reduced hardware requirements, higher utilisation of resources, and improved energy efficiency. Whether you are consolidating workloads to reduce data-centre costs or seeking a better way to meet changing business demands, IBM Power Systems has the answers.

IBM’s fully integrated approach to the design, development and testing of IBM Power Systems servers ensures that they meet the highest standards in the industry for reliability and security, making Power the ideal platform for serious enterprise workloads. Northdoor strengthens this built-in dependability with expert support and maintenance services perfected over more than three decades.

Unlock the value of data

IBM POWER processors are ideally suited for the demands of big data, providing more per-core performance and more memory bandwidth than x86 processors. Innovations such as CAPI can enable order-of-magnitude improvements in analytics and machine learning, and open-source analytical tools really excel on the platform.

With faster analysis of big data on IBM Power, your business can identify and act on opportunities for profit ahead of competitors. What’s more, IBM Power Systems provides sufficient performance to kick-start your AI projects, helping you steal a march on the competition.

Reinforce your business

For mission-critical workloads running on AIX, i or Power Linux, where even short periods of downtime are unacceptable, Power Systems continues to offer exceptional stability and resilience. Multiple points of redundancy in the system architecture eliminate potential single points of failure, making Power Systems the platform for choice for enterprises.

With the optional IBM PowerHA software, you can create high-availability clusters spanning different locations for the ultimate reassurance that your core systems will be available at all times. As with IBM PowerVM, these additional capabilities do not come at the cost of increased administration: IBM PowerHA keeps systems running and enables you to focus on other priorities.

IBM Power10

The new incarnation of IBM Power technology offers a combination of speed and flexibility on a hybrid-cloud platform with in-built security. IBM Power10 provides significant improvements in scalability, tripling the processing speed of POWER9 for the same energy consumption and rackspace requirements. It also features dynamic capacity, enabling resources to be used on a flexible pay-as-you-go basis. The entire system memory is transparently encrypted at all times—with no impact on performance and no additional management—while homomorphic encryption capabilities enable sensitive data to be analysed without decryption.

Thanks to higher per-core performance than the previous generation and the new Memory Inception feature—in which clustered Power10 systems have direct access to each other’s memory—organisations can process enormous volumes of data almost in real time. In addition, Power10 features an embedded Matrix Math Accelerator that delivers 20 times greater per-socket performance for AI inference, so that AI workloads can be kept on the main processors rather than farmed out to GPUs.
Read more on the IBM Power10 scale-out and Midrange Servers and High-end systems 

IBM POWER9

Designed specifically for enterprise AI—but also ideal for supporting traditional IBM AIX, IBM i and Linux workloads—POWER9 features state-of-the-art I/O subsystem technology, including NVIDIA NVLink, PCIe Gen4, and OpenCAPI technologies that maximise data bandwidth across the entire system stack. These technologies have contributed to a number of record performances on industry benchmarks. As the pace of change rises across all industries, taking advantage of AI on Power Systems could be the key to staying ahead of competitors.

Power HA for IBM i

Dependable IT infrastructure has never been more vital. For the systems that support core business activities—sales, finance, communications, logistics, and so on—even brief outages can create enormous disruption to the organisation and damage to the brand. In a world where customers and partners may be online around the clock, and where interconnected global financial markets never sleep, losing the ability to transact business even for a few minutes could be disastrous. With PowerHA clustering technology protecting key systems, your organisation will be able to focus on core business issues, safe in the knowledge that critical data and business processes will always be available when they are needed the most.

External Storage for IBM i

Using internal disk storage for IBM i environments on IBM Power Systems certainly has advantages. It is simpler to have a single box for both processing and storage, and data transfer is extremely fast. So what are the key benefits of moving to external disk instead? In a nutshell, you’ll gain a dedicated, specialised platform for storing data that will provide more built-in functionality and easier expansion. Any storage capacity you deploy in an external array can also be shared with other servers, both within your Power landscape and in your distributed landscape. This means that you can invest in new capacity with more confidence and less risk of obsolescence.