The Power Systems plan has three prongs

Share this post:

There is a plan, which is always reassuring to know. Let me tell you about it. I was part of an event in Germany earlier in the year, and the plan was announced there. We have been saying a lot about Linux and AI in recent years, which are areas we are relatively new into and where we deliver differentiation from our competition and value for our customers. But you might not have seen so much mention of our long-standing offerings based on AIX and IBM i, which continue to grow and be the heart of business infrastructure all around the world.

So, the plan has three prongs, and the first is this – “Deliver Modern Innovation and value to AIX and IBM i”. As you would expect, the wording has been carefully thought out there. We are delivering it, as the latest updates for AIX and IBM i have both been announced on the 7^th of August. More details on those another time. The innovation is modern, with the forward-looking focus of the 30^th Anniversary of IBM i being a clear example of that. Another example is this recent article, “AIX is at the Center of Cloud Initiatives and AI”. Both AIX and IBM i are strategic to IBM and our customers, they continue to evolve and remain ideal foundations for your cutting-edge solutions. Value is also there deliberately. I refreshed my Total Cost of Ownership model for POWER9 and current Cloud competition for this year’s Technical University in Rome, and those results were even better than those I showed before with POWER8. For some workloads, IBM Power Systems can be more than 4x to 10x cheaper than AWS, Azure or Oracle Clouds. See a short example of how this works out here. IBM i also has recent reports, which show major TCO benefits, so “value” for AIX and IBM i is a core part of the plan.

For the second prong of our strategy, we come back to Linux with “Drive flexible and resilient infrastructure into enterprise Linux deployments”. Again, carefully chosen words there, which are relevant to many workloads, particularly SAP HANA. The flexibility of the Tailored Datacentre Integration, when combined with PowerVM, is the ideal implantation method for SAP HANA. More on that here. Resilience is key because ITIC’s 2018 Hourly cost of Downtime Survey found that 98% of 800 respondents say that, on average, a single hour of downtime per year costs their company over $100,000. Additionally, 81% indicated that the average hourly cost of an outage exceeds $300,000. And 33% of respondents say hourly downtime costs their firms from $1 million to over $5 million (USD). IBM Power Systems provides the industry leading uptime, ranked the most reliable for the 10th straight year. In fact, IBM Power Systems ranks #1 in every major reliability category by ITIC and is an industry leader of Mid Range and High End Servers. IBM Power delivered the highest uptime of 99.9996% (2.0 minutes/server/annum unplanned downtime) of any non-mainframe Linux platforms in their survey. And Enterprise Linux? Enterprise Linux on Power Systems is the smart choice for modern workloads because it provides an open, scalable infrastructure built to process massive amounts of data quickly, efficiently and cost-effectively to formulate real-time actionable business insight.

Lastly, “Lead the industry with the highest performing AI solutions that are simple to consume”. The world’s fastest and smartest supercomputers, Summit and Sierra, are built on the IBM Power Systems AC922 and show IBM leading the industry. There are also a range of proof points for highest performing, which come from our collaboration with NVIDIA, with NVLink 2.0 linking the POWER9 processors and the Tesla V100 GPUs in a way no other architecture can match. More on that in this article from Lee Rossiter. There is a range of AI solutions available, which are designed to address the different challenges Data Scientists encounter today. Having difficulties getting your frameworks installed and working, which is very common? That is what PowerAI is for, for free, quickly and easily. This demo from Chris Parsons shows that challenge fixed in just 4 minutes! It worked for me too, resulting in this demo where I taught a server to identify a breed of a dog. But, if I gave it a picture of a dachshund, which was not in the original dataset, it got a little confused. That is where PowerAI Vision came in, as it was so easy to use that my 11 year old daughter, Elizabeth, added the images so the new model learned to identify her favourite dog. Elizabeth is my Subject Matter Expert on dogs, but she is no Data Scientist (yet!). The simplicity delivered by PowerAI Vision allowed her to fix our problem. What issues does your business have, which could be solved with PowerAI? Some example Use Cases here.

Lastly, as pointed out by Petra Bührer, there is an important difference to this plan than be assumed from the initial view of three prongs. Unlike a trident, these prongs are very much intertwined. They all work together, to deliver the solutions needed by our customers. AIX and IBM i sit alongside Enterprise Linux Virtual Servers, all hosted by PowerVM and working together. The data held in the vital Systems of Record, running on AIX and IBM i, can be an excellent data source for AI Machine Learning and Deep Learning. See an example of how that can be done in the webcast by Ross Cruickshank, as part of the IBM Power Systems Technical Webinars, organised by Jyoti Dodhia. Not kept separate at all, but working together as equally important and collaborative elements of the strategy.

So, there we go. There is a plan, which you can benefit from today. You can also know that the future with IBM Power Systems is bright!