IBM Power11 to Launch With Full Range of Servers, Cloud Availability on Day 1
The hardware announcement centers on AI, hybrid cloud and zero planned downtime
IBM continued its year of major hardware releases with its July 8 announcement of Power11, which IBM has characterized as a milestone offering built for the age of AI and hybrid cloud.
“This is going to be one of the bigger—if not the biggest—IBM Power launches ever,” Bargav Balakrishnan, vice president of product management for IBM Power, said at a press briefing previewing the announcement.
That’s because, for the first time ever, high-end, mid-range and entry-level Power11servers will ship on general availability day, July 25. In another first for the line, Power11 will also be available in the cloud on Day 1, via IBM Power Virtual Server.
AI Acceleration, Hybrid Cloud Capabilities
As it prepares for that immediate full-scale rollout, IBM’s promotional efforts are centering on the system’s AI and hybrid cloud capabilities. Just as with the recently shipped z17 and LinuxONE 5, Power11 can accommodate IBM’s new AI-dedicated chip, the PCIe-mounted Spyre accelerator, which is expected to be available in Q4 2025. IBM is also highlighting a seamless hybrid cloud deployment model that takes advantage of consistent architecture between on-prem and the cloud.
The Power11 processor boasts a 55% core performance improvement over Power9 and can incorporate 25% more cores on a single chip than comparable Power10 servers, but Balakrishnan stressed that AI workloads depend on more than sheer compute.
“It’s not just acceleration—buy a GPU and toss it in there. It’s too complex,” he said. With that in mind, Power11 is optimized for Red Hat tools, the forthcoming watsonx Code Assistant for i and watsonx.data, a data lakehouse meant to help organizations implement AI at scale, Balakrishnan noted.
Avoiding Planned and Unplanned Downtime
Power11 is IBM’s most resilient Power server ever, having tested at “six nines” of availability (99.9999%), which equates to less than 31.5 seconds of unplanned downtime a year, Balakrishnan noted.
One way to ensure unplanned downtime is to take adequate security measures, and to that end, IBM is highlighting a number of tools. Among the most prominent security tools in Power11 is IBM Power Cyber Vault, which proactively takes immutable data snapshots in providing sub-one-minute ransomware threat detection, according to IBM testing.
Planned downtime, on the other hand, is being reduced to zero on Power11, an achievement aided by features including autonomous patching and workload movement, plus IBM Concert, an AI-powered operations center from the watsonx family.
“One of the things that is new in Power 11 is we’re not only developing within the power system stack, but we’re taking advantage of the full IBM stack,” Tom McPherson, general manager for IBM Power, said at the pre-announcement briefing.
What the Users Are Saying
IBM has been keeping close tabs on its install base. “Over the last 90 days, we’ve probably talked to 500 customers and partners,” Balakrishnan said as he outlined the trending priorities of IBM customers.
IBM clients are not only scaling up by increasing compute, but scaling out. Balakrishnan said that includes stretching AI acceleration all the way to the edge, where processing capabilities can be positioned closer to the data source to reduce latency.
Data sovereignty is another priority for customers, he added. “Especially in Europe, we see a lot of clients doing repatriation of their data and workloads for sovereignty reasons,” Balakrishnan said. “Hybrid cloud architecture lets that happen more flexibly.”
He added that SAP and ERP workloads, hybrid cloud, Red Hat Open Shift, flexible deployment models and data sovereignty are also among IBM clients’ areas of focus as they weigh their options on the Power platform. New Power clients tend to be attracted to its Red Hat Open Shift optimization and the option to run SAP in the cloud via RISE with SAP, McPherson said.
“We have 10,000 SAP clients on the platform, and we see new clients coming on in the SAP space because they have the flexibility to be on-prem with SAP and also have a path to (Rise with SAP) on Power Virtual Server,” he said.
Even for on-prem customers, IBM is seeing a “major trend” in consumption-based as-a-service models due to the agility they enable, Balakrishnan noted.
Hence, Power11’s Day 1 cloud availability. With Power Virtual Server, “we’re really unlocking the value of hybrid cloud for our clients,” Balakrishnan said. “It’s about accelerating impact with consistency, not complexity.”