Power Systems: the open innovation platform

05 September, 2017
David H. Deans
IBM

CEOs know that business technology is in a state of perpetual motion, and trendsetting innovation is often a collaborative effort that will engage savvy business partners. Also, digital transformation success in today’s hyper-competitive environment requires an open ecosystem — one that enables dynamic optimization that’s based on specific IT needs and wants.

CIOs and CTOs crave the hybrid IT flexibility to combine data center and cloud services while achieving new insights faster through acceleration. OpenPOWER servers are different by design — engineered at every level to be more powerful and open than other distributed systems.

You don’t have to rip and replace your existing infrastructure to transform your business, just put your most data intensive workloads on the servers that were born to run them. Moreover, the cognitive era is here. Are you ready to seize the cognitive advantage for your organization?

Empowering open innovation

For many IT leaders, one of the greatest challenges is finding the right one- or two-socket server strategy that will support their ongoing digital transformation journey. There are lots of variables to consider. That said, IDC believes that evolving digital capabilities in a business means adopting the right applications running on the right IT infrastructure. The following is a summary of an IDC White Paper, sponsored by IBM, on this hot topic.

Harness a new breed of servers

For IT to traverse the one or two-socket server roadmap effectively, all the way from stateless web applications to cognitive and predictive workloads, the server hardware that the infrastructure is designed with needs to meet a variety of requirements. As these workloads evolve, they cannot be successfully deployed on low-end commodity hardware. Clearly, the demands on the infrastructure will be too great.

The servers need to be easy to configure and support rapid deployment. They must also support the next-gen applications that will be the engines of the organization’s digital transformation. They must perform extremely well with data-intense workloads. They should ideally support various open and standardized acceleration technologies. They need to be secure. And, they should provide high availability across the whole stack.

Furthermore, one or two-socket server infrastructure for these workloads must also be manageable without requiring an unusual skill set. It is important that they support a broad software ecosystem and are fully cloud-enabled. The servers must run on a widely-adopted OS for digital transformation and can run the full breadth of open source software solutions.

Many business leaders that are looking to implement digital transformation applications, and that do not want to run them on their scale-up environment, are investigating one or two-socket infrastructure. However, what many are not doing is comparing the one or two-socket offerings on x86 with one or two-socket IBM Power Systems, the only alternative to x86 — which can objectively be considered a price and performance leader.

The IBM POWER architecture is designed to adapt to new forms of data, whether it is structured data, measured in petabytes, blobs of unstructured data or streams. The system has very high ingest rates for data, and its caches have been designed to keep the processor busy.

With POWER, there is a new breed of low-capex and low-opex one or two-socket offerings on the market with little endian Linux as the OS that seems very well suited for the data-intensive applications required to support the digital transformation. Buyers would benefit from comparing these solutions with the x86 products they are already considering.

Finally, one major advantage of POWER in the cloud is that the architecture is completely open and licensable — from the hardware to the code, essentially like the ARM model. Hyperscale cloud providers such as Google and Rackspace have stated that they are developing and manufacturing POWER architecture components for their data centers, which they’ve licensed from IBM through the OpenPOWER Foundation.

Open innovation in action

To learn more about the most powerful, cost-efficient scale-out infrastructure for your digital transformation journey, download the IDC white paper titled “A New Breed of Servers for Digital Transformation,” then reach out to an IBM representative or Business Partner.

Also, explore this Power Systems client reference story from the healthcare sector, and just imagine how you could achieve your own digital business goals and objectives with a solution that’s proven to deliver a remarkable return on investment (ROI).

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