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I recently had the opportunity to collaborate with an open source database (OSDB) vendor to jointly deliver a webcast for select clients and IBM Business Partners. It was overwhelming to see the pace at which OSDBs (read: big data workloads) are gaining popularity, finding places in data centers and, most importantly, clocking extraordinary growth! There is significant adoption of OSDBs among the Fortune 500 and Global 500 companies today. It’s no surprise that Gartner is saying, “By 2018, 70 percent of new applications will run on open source databases.” One obvious reason behind this is lower total cost of ownership (TCO).

For such modern workloads and OSDBs, don’t you wish for a hardware platform that can complement its capabilities?

• A platform that can offer superior CPU performance with the capability of executing parallel tasks.
• A platform that can support higher memory bandwidth with reduced access latency.
• A platform that has significant innovation built into it.

IBM Power Systems is a direct answer to all of the items in this platform performance wish list. It provides the capabilities needed to handle the varying modern data workloads (OSDBs, big data, analytics and so forth) that your business demands!  That’s why companies from startups like CipherHealth to Fortune 500 customers like Florida Blue  are replacing their Intel x86 infrastructure with Power Systems.

POWER8 is the first microprocessor designed for big data and analytics workloads, such as OSDBs. When systems are designed for these workloads, there are key attributes that are important to create a balanced system design:

• Processing capability: IBM POWER8 delivers four times more threads per core in comparison to commodity infrastructure. It ably supports a growing number of users who need reports or to perform ad hoc analytics. This is because the processor can run more concurrent queries in parallel faster, across multiple cores with more threads per core.
• More memory space: IBM POWER8 delivers four times more memory bandwidth, to access up to 1 TB of memory for data operations and enlarged cache in every processor. This delivers the levels of performance your teams need to make decisions in real time.
• I/O bandwidth: IBM POWER8 delivers faster input/output (I/O) to ingest, move and access large volumes of data so that analytics results are available faster.

Still not sure why you should consider replacing your commodity Intel x86 infrastructure with POWER8 and Power Systems? Check out this video by Buzz Moschetti from MongoDB—the most popular NoSQL database on the planet—to learn why you should be running your MongoDB apps on Power Systems.

IBM POWER8 offers a wide portfolio to suit varied client workloads, but also to suit their budgets. On the one hand, you have enterprise-class POWER8 servers, POWER8 converged infrastructure and POWER scale-out offerings, and on the other, you have scale-out Linux servers (LC class).

The LC line is where most open innovations are happening because of industry-wide momentum around OpenPOWER, which has made Power Systems a truly open architecture. The IBM OpenPOWER LC servers (Linux-only based Power Systems) run the industry-standard Linux (Ubuntu, SUSE or Red Hat Linux) operating system, released in parity with x86 variants, downloadable from the same URL. For a Linux administrator experienced at running and managing Linux, Linux on POWER should be nearly transparent!

IBM OpenPOWER LC servers are priced to compete with commodity alternatives, while offering superior performance and ROI for compute- and data-intensive applications. These systems offer the flexibility you need to quickly integrate innovative technology solutions, avoid vendor lock in and accelerate business results.

Confident of POWER8 performance for OSDB workloads, IBM offers a special offer guaranteeing 2x price-performance advantage versus x86 on big data servers for MongoDB OR 1.8x price-performance advantage versus x86 for EDB Postgres.

Many clients I’ve worked with in India from the telecommunication and public sectors have already gone live with the OpenPOWER LC line of servers. I see the information above as reason enough for clients to start rethinking their choice of platform while considering hosting of their modern data workloads.

IBM Systems Lab Services can partner with you in assessing your existing and future workloads on IBM Power Systems and help with a seamless migration experience.

The post IBM Power Systems: Best choice for open source DBs – guaranteed appeared first on IBM Systems Blog: In the Making.