IBM Expands the Power10 Portfolio
Today, IBM announced that it has expanded its Power10 portfolio. First introduced in September 2021, Power10 was designed to meet the needs of enterprise-level organizations. The newly announced portfolio additions bring the same advantages to mid-sized and small organizations with mid-range and scale-out systems. These products are designed to help smaller and mid-sized organizations improve performance, automate business operations and vastly improve security across multiple environments. A new pay-as-you-go consumption model improves flexibility and speed-to-deployment as well.
Keeping up With Evolving Business Climates
The current business climate is volatile. Around the globe, businesses of all sizes must adapt to rapidly changing conditions in every area of their operations. Unreliable supply chains, lack of materials, gaps in human resources, and numerous other pitfalls make each day an exercise in adaptability. All of this is set against a backdrop of ongoing digital transformation, as organizations restructure their IT operations in order to take advantage of the flexibility and scalability that cloud computing offers.
“The world has really changed in the last two and a half years. We are trying to help our clients respond faster and faster to the rapidly changing market,” says Todd Boyd, Senior Technical Staff Member, IBM Power Product Management.
Resiliency, Security and Performance
Having the right technology to run essential workloads in the face of volatility is crucial. Resiliency is key, because having systems go down only adds to the chaos along with the expense associated with outages.
Security is also a must, given the rising risks and costs of security breaches, particularly in industries like finance and healthcare. Businesses collect more data than ever, and while it has the power to help them serve customers better and make more informed business decisions, it must be secured properly and in compliance with applicable regulations.
In addition to resiliency and security, performance and economics are crucial factors for organizations of every size, as well. Companies are investing in technology to keep data secure, and need that technology to perform well enough to meet business demands.
All of these needs are addressed in this release. The new servers are an addition to the Power10 portfolio introduced last September with the E1080, which is designed to meet the needs of larger organizations. The new additions—Power10 Midrange E1050 and entry-level Power S1014, S1022 and S1024—bring the same high-end capabilities to smaller shops.
“These new systems are really engineered for the environment. We are delivering agility, security, resiliency and efficiency across the board and across our entire portfolio,” notes Boyd.
A Look at the New Servers and Capabilities
The Power10 Midrange E1050 is a 4-socket server that performs like an 8-socket. It offers 96 cores, with more performance per core than comparable servers. The S1014, S1022 and S1024 are considered scale-out servers with enterprise-class processors and memory. “These are really targeted at helping clients manage all the volatility and do it much more efficiently,” says Boyd.
“We are doing this by introducing twice as many cores as we had before,” adds Boyd. “Along with that we are doubling memory bandwidth. You can’t do computations unless you get the data in and out of the processor,” he says, stressing the importance of the additional memory bandwidth.
Regardless of the current infrastructure being used, a business that switches to a Power10 server can continue as-is but with increased performance, or move toward a hybrid infrastructure, taking advantage of the dynamic capacity available in the cloud. “This Power10 expansion is aligned with everything we are doing around hybrid cloud,” notes Boyd. As more organizations undertake or continue to progress toward digital transformation, having the IT to support it becomes increasingly important, and the Power10 offerings are designed with that in mind.
Perhaps one of the most important aspects of the announcement is that organizations will be able to choose to pay by the minute for consumption. That means they will only be charged for what they use, giving smaller businesses more control and flexibility as they build and scale, according to Boyd.
Security Optimization for the Whole Stack
Security is of the utmost importance for every business, and Power10 addresses the need to keep data secure. “We’ve improved security,” Boyd says. “One of the big things is transparent memory encryption. We are actually encrypting the data in the processor that’s stored within the memory. There’s hardware within the chip that does the encryption, so there’s no software overhead, no performance impact.”
A second factor regarding security that makes Power10 stand out is that the whole stack is optimized from a security standpoint. IBM designed the chip, the system, the firmware and developed the virtualization capability and even the OSes. This reduces the fragmentation that may result when different companies handle various aspects of security.
Power10 is optimized for mission-critical workloads, says Boyd. It allows organizations to maximize the value of their existing infrastructure, modernizing as needed. “They can use their existing infrastructure, alongside cloud-native apps and containerized workloads all on the same processor,” he says. The latest Power10 offerings bring flexibility and agility to meet the needs of a modern business climate, plus the security and resiliency required to operate to medium and small organizations with record-breaking performance.