A Guide to IBM Power Systems | Facts & Features

A Brief History of IBM Power

IBM Power Systems describes what’s often referred to a “family” of servers, capable of remediating many of the complex challenges that stymie workload performance, security, and reliability.

“Companies large and small, from every industry, and from around the globe, depend on IBM Power Systems to “get the job done”.

– Eric Schnatterly in 4 out of 5 Fortune 100 Companies do this…

Specifically, where regulated industries face unique and exacting pressures to ensure application and infrastructure reliability and constant 24/7 uptime, IBM Power is not only simply about better business outcomes. Patients, customers, and a host of other end-users are all influenced by the reliability, security and performance of applications and wider IT resources.

IBM Power Systems – entrusted by financiers, healthcare professionals and many more across the UK – are known for getting faster and better at responding to modern business requirements where scalability, acceleration and security are priorities.

Why Businesses Use IBM Power

Designed to, as countless numbers of business success stories support, help enterprises modernise frictionlessly, IBM Power is a household name in market-leading technologies. Regardless of the market or business size, IBM Power helps businesses in more ways than one:

• Rewardingly agile with faster response to business demands
• A favourable multi-layered security approach means data is protected “from core to cloud”
• Don’t just meet sustainability goals, but maximise carbon footprint reduction
• Unlock more insights and automation features

Is Agility on the Agenda?

Modern business agility describes where an organisation can do more than weather market challenges and changing conditions, but continuously adapt and flex IT resources to innovate, evolve and grow with the times.

Sometimes the pace of change is set by market patterns, at another moment it might be steered by customer demand, or even disrupted by regulatory change. Regardless of the pressures, IBM Power has become synonyms with the kind of modern agility that enterprises depend on nowadays.

Benefits of IBM Power

IBM Power is known to unlock multiple benefits for any given IT environment, including scalability and performance boosts, helping to give the most demanding workloads even more horsepower.

“IBM Power10 is all about greater horsepower from the next generation of IT, which means modernising effortlessly with hybrid cloud.”

Benefits are not, however, limited to performance upgrades. Customer testimonials, like this automotive manufacturer, identified how IBM workloads, when optimised, have the potential to boost sales operations on a mass scale. Another leading example, a US Healthcare Provider needed a strategy that was de-risked, navigating disaster scenarios that could potentially impact patient outcomes. Embracing the high availability and reliability of IBM Power Systems, and running IBM i operating system, this client could ensure around the clock coverage.

Workloads on IBM Power

It just makes sense.

As new, often emerging, technologies integrate into a competitive market, IT professionals with all kinds of agendas may feel anxious about different agents of change. Workloads are becoming increasingly more complex every year, whether that’s from data growth or regulatory change. This creates a critical business case for the adoption of new technologies or, at least, the upgrade of legacy kit. Now more than ever, industries must discover and rediscover agility in new ways: often, for IT professionals, this means increasingly agile infrastructures and systems like IBM Power.

Explore IBM Power10 facts and highlights in our resource.

IT professionals looking to take advantage of IBM Power Systems can expect the following benefits (and more):

• Greater processing power
• Sophisticated infrastructure
• Scalability upgrades
• Advanced security

Core IBM Power Capabilities

According to IBM, Power capabilities are far ranging and beneficial, often resulting in a TCO advantage for customers.
Key IBM Power capabilities, include:

• When surveyed, IBM Power had a 99.999% availability score.
• IBM Power will experience > 3.3 minutes of outages because of security concerns.
• Case studies have evidenced sustainability perks, helping to accelerate climate goal realisation.
• IBM Power E1080 performance offers AI-readiness that’s cutting-edge, with roughly x5 faster AI referencing per socket (versus the E980 model).

IBM Power Features (top level)

The core IBM Power features ensure that modern businesses can remain competitive, secure, and optimally performant, regardless of the demanding, regulated nature of their workloads.

Our in-house IBM expertise has identified the top features that customers find rewarding. Those include:

#1. ‘Modernisable’ IT

Given the nature of the sophisticated infrastructure that IBM technologies like Power can support, and the common reward of performance boosts and greater efficiency, it’s no surprise that many of the UK’s enterprises trust Power.

Adapting technologies that unlock immediate value, and long into the future, is a form of futureproofing that’s no small feat. One of the core IBM Power Systems features is its ability to integrate analytics and machine learning for superior performance. Even artificial intelligence has a role to play here in defining the cutting-edge performance capability.

#2. Scaling Workloads to Demand

Aside from next-gen processing power, IBM Power Systems feature the ability to deal with complex scalability requirements from the world’s most exacting workloads.
Built and designed to manage large volumes of data and workloads that need to run routinely at peak performance, IBM Power Systems are ideal for scalability. Ultimately, this means infrastructure can truly flourish and grow with your business demands.

Scalability options will benefit existing IT environments, helping to grow on-demand, and with a pace of change that’s set by your business, its preferred markets, customer need, and industry regulation. Looking ahead, this also means greater flexibility in how workloads can evolve – we’re talking about AI and automation, such as Watson.

#3. Layered Security

It’s no secret that IT vulnerabilities (like poor patching) can leave an entire company open to the possibility of a risky breach. IBM Power Systems, however, have a multi-layered approach to today’s pressing security concerns, ensuring data protection that lasts.