The Ultimate IBM Power11 Buyers Guide

What’s New, Exciting & Game-Changing About IBM Power11?

The IBM Power brand has long been associated with powerful mission-critical and data-intensive workloads, adopted widely across regulated markets, such as financial services providers, healthcare and retail.

Technology leaders are now keenly aware of, and challenged to adopt, the next wave of AI-ready, autonomous IT. Such transformative years await organisations like yours, but there’s still a lag in how we close the gap between your IT estate today and a fully autonomous, resilient platform.

It is not only clear that IBM Power is a highly competitive and performant platform for artificial intelligence adoption, but IBM is introducing innovations across areas on everyone’s mind:

• Integration with automation and AI
• Productivity
• Business Continuity

Most technologists nowadays are chasing the dream of an ‘AI era’. What is likely to follow, analysts like the International Data Corporation (IDC) have been quick to observe, is a boom in new agentic technologies along with a system complexity.

According to IBM’s newsroom, Power11 will “deliver simplified, aways-on operations with hybrid cloud flexibility for enterprises to maintain competitiveness in the AI era.”

In one, punchy statement, IBM’s latest generation of Power is poised to leverage tomorrow’s technologies behind a single, AI-ready, always available platform.

Behind the buzzwords, our analysts have broken down the key areas of the Power11 platform, addressing where the next generation of systems can tackle persistent, disruptive operational challenges.

#1. Zero Downtime, Even Less Interruption

We’ve entered a new age where the limits of, and risks associated with, downtime is no longer acceptable. Operational continuity and resilience are enshrined in new regulatory expectations (such as the Digital Operational Resilience Act, or DORA).

So, what’s changed?

Whether caused by an IT outage or worse, a breach, downtime is financially devasting, and reputationally harming. Historically, operations will have periodic, scheduled maintenance, which cam create costly service disruption down the line to end customers. The alternative – ignoring system maintenance and patching – opens the door to operational risk. It is in those moments, however brief, where maintenance is either overlooked, delayed, or where services are interrupted, that security vulnerabilities are heightened.

Whilst IBM Power Systems have typically been risk-adverse, minimising unplanned downtime, the new Power11 is guaranteeing 0 hours of planned downtime.

This is a paradigm shift: in-between rolling updates and patching, maintenance becomes proactive without the risk of interrupting applications. For businesses, this means continuous operations with all the benefits of upgraded, updated, and patched systems.

CSI’s experts say: expressions like “autonomous patching” and “automated workload movement” add up quickly to ensure that operations remain seamless and continuous. Not only is unplanned risk minimised, but your IT teams can shift their collective focus away from testing and executing planned upgrades into new areas of innovation.

AI on Downtime

Starting with IBM Power11, the interoperation with IBM Concert will introduce gen AI to not only identify risks but automate remediation tactics.

What does this mean for your business?

Industry leaders are increasingly under pressure to modernise and automate with bleeding-edge technologies, and an IBM Power11 upgrade is one way to deploy deep automation and blunt known downtime issues associated with maintenance in the long run.

#2. > 1 Minute Ransomware Detection

Headlines that announce, alarmingly, the next major victims and industries of ransomware are common. The recent ‘Supermarket sweep’, a spate of cybercrimes breaching major UK retailers, is one such example of high-profile intrusion.

Addressing ransomware detection, IBM Power Cyber Vault is a resiliency solution that follows NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) principles to identify, protect and detect cyber threats. With these layers of cyber resiliency, IBM Power11 has integrated protection, defending against attacks like data corruption and encryption.

This is only the surface of how IBM Power11 is mindfully designed to layer in resiliency and continuity measures, ensuring businesses are hardened against the evolving threat-scape.

#3. AI at Scale, at Last

Artificial intelligence is changing the nature of our work. AI has the potential to touch into, and meaningfully transform, most aspects of a business from the inside out. The lessons of cloud repatriation have proven, to many business leaders, that investments in emerging technologies can be costly and ineffective if implemented improperly.

Moving from promise to profit, IBM Power11 is telling a different story around AI. With the support of IBM Spyre Accelerator, IBM Power11 offers AI-ready infrastructure which, according to IBM, has “built-in, on-chip acceleration for inferencing and will be able to scale to support mission-critical AI workloads”.

Modernising your business through AI has never been easier with IBM Power11, which is designed to offer the performance demands to operationalise AI across hybrid environments.

Getting into Hybrid Cloud with IBM Power

Addressing vendors in London, IBM unveiled Power11 with language like “ascension” and this idea of not only levelling up your infrastructure, but upgrading to a new height, a near-groundbreaking level of innovation.

This generation consulted approximately 100 sponsor-users, helping to build and designed Power11, meaning it’s a feat of co-creation and is customer-centric. Importantly, IBM Power11 addresses modern business and operational challenges. As mentioned, resiliency and AI are priorities across most technology agendas right now. But as increasingly more environments embrace hybrid workloads, your infrastructure will be facing greater demand than before and even more urgency to innovate.

If you visualise IBM Power11’s capabilities into a triangle, resilience, AI and hybrid cloud are the three corners. No one corner is more important, but they can all interrelate in the much wider agenda of a company.

A bank can run its core banking system on IBM i on-premises while extending customer-facing mobile applications using containers on OpenShift in the cloud – both on IBM Power. This is just one example where IBM Power can enrich an organisation’s hybrid cloud agenda, by offering flexibility and resiliency behind one platform.

Power Up with CSI

If you are considering an upgrade to IBM Power11, or want a no-obligation consultation about planning the next steps with your existing IBM i estate, get in touch with our one of our specialists today.