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Big data, machine learning, social media, disruptive start-ups, mobile commerce and the Internet of Things. Amid all the rapid technology-driven change of recent years, one thing has stayed the same: the intense cost pressure on the IT function. Even in enterprises that recognize the full strategic value of IT, the budget is usually a key pain point for IT leaders.

If you are tasked with cutting costs and simultaneously increasing performance, security, availability and flexibility, you may be finding it a challenge to blend new approaches (in particular, the cloud) with existing practices. If your organization uses IBM Power Systems™, it is likely that the platform is running critically important systems – ERP, CRM, financials, analytics, transactional websites and other revenue-generating systems. As you tackle growing demands from the business for new applications, you must also ensure that these critical systems remain secure, reliable, responsive and – above all – cost effective. If you have expanded out into distributed systems, you may face challenges in controlling the sprawl of servers in your data center, and in finding the budget to keep them powered up, cooled and maintained.

Whether you are upgrading from an existing Power Systems installation, replacing (or avoiding) an x86 server farm, or both, the latest IBM Power Systems servers can deliver the game-changing cost efficiency that you need.

The latest IBM POWER8 processor-based systems offer a significant step up in terms of performance, capacity and scalability. What you may not know is that they also deliver better value for the money, in many cases helping organizations increase their performance while reducing their total cost of ownership. For example, upgrading from POWER7® can provide the same performance in less than half the footprint – in other words, 2 times the performance at no additional charge. With IBM POWER8, you can cut per-core software licenses by up to 50 percent, drastically reducing your total data center spend.[1]

Additionally, the Enterprise Systems for the Cloud with POWER8 bring together the cost savings of cloud economics and the benefits of on-premises infrastructure. These solutions allow customers to populate the servers with the maximum compute capacity they expect they will need, but only activate and pay for the capacity when they need it. With the option of elastic capacity, customers can increase or decrease capacity as demand dictates. This cost-effective flexibility can be a real game-changer for IT leaders struggling to present a high-value and economical cloud strategy to their CFOs.

Real enterprises are already achieving tangible business benefits with POWER8. Friedhelm Loh Group is seeing 10 percent higher warehouse throughput and 90 percent faster production planning, trimming $100,000 from their energy bill. Fransabank is achieving 40 percent higher performance for its core banking systems and cutting 3 hours from overnight processing. Celero is serving financial services clients better with 10 times faster Oracle database performance and cutting monthly IT leasing costs by 30 percent.

To help you see how much your organization could save by upgrading or migrating to POWER8, we’ve built a fast and easy-to-use TCO tool, available at ibm.biz/PowerTCO. There’s no need to create an account, so you can potentially see in less than a minute how much an equivalent POWER8 processor-based infrastructure could save you in comparison to your current infrastructure. We’ve taken into account any hardware purchase costs, maintenance, OS and application costs and environmental costs to give you an accurate estimate in dollars.

So why not take a minute or two on the TCO tool to see the potential benefits – what have you got to lose (apart from a big chunk of your IT costs)?

[1] Based on IBM Internal Measurements/Projections on 2-socket/4U POWER8 systems versus 2-socket/4U POWER7 systems

The post Spend less on IT operations and achieve more with IBM POWER8 appeared first on IBM Systems Blog: In the Making.