Smart, Sustainable, Scalable and Secure! Discover the 4 Pillars of IBM Power10

As many organisations reflect on decisions made at speed during the pandemic, the critical question now arises: are your core IT operations agile and ever-ready for the next wave of rapidly evolving digital demands?

For me this is not just an issue of smart technology integration, scalability and security, but one of sustainability too, in order to create shared value and scalable, sustainable compute.

The new generation of IBM Power, built with Power10 architecture is offering a number of consumption models to suit your workload needs delivers on exactly this. In helping you ambidextrously respond faster to business demands, protect data from core to cloud, and astreamlining of both insights and automation, this heralds the enablement of energy efficient modernization with a frictionless hybrid cloud experience – more on this shortly! It also builds on a strong legacy of the Power family being first in its class for transactional verticals, with world leading reliability results for mission critical applications over the last 10 years (IDC Research). Indeed, achieving a maximum of 6 minutes downtime across an entire year is a statistic that really does say it all. So what more does Power10 offer?

Sustainability by Design

Critically, sustainability considerations were clearly embedded from conceptualisation and not a peripheral later add-on or retro-fit. Designed on top of the IBM innovative 7nm EUV process, IBM Power10 offers 3x the capacity but with 52% lower energy consumption for the same workload in Power E1080 vis a vis E88OC, and with a significantly reduced carbon footprint too. Specifically, this equates to a 33% lower energy consumption in Power E1080 as compared to the Power E980 for the very same workload. The IBM Power10 is designed to help increase the efficiency of data centres right around the world whilst also reducing the costs of space and energy. These transformational developments and the trajectory of becoming a truly “green” ecosystem from end-to-end are illustrated below! 

And there is more to explore! Let’s now take a look at the broader innovation afforded by Power10 and how this aligns to other critical needs of our time. Alongside the 3x energy efficiency benefits of this bleeding edge 7nm chip with 18B devices, other real-world tangible benefits relate to Artificial Intelligence and Security focussed ISA additions, alongside the capacity to enable continual readiness to be ambidextrous to change – quite simply a modern day imperative. Indeed, a recent survey from the IBM Institute of Business Value which interviewed 15,000 CEOs and CIOs revealed that operational flexibility and agility is the leading issue faced by organisations today. This is further supported by research findings from the Gartner 2021 ‘CIO Agenda: Industry Perspectives Overview’ which found operational optimisation with digital processes is anticipated to accelerate by 18% from 2020 to 2022. 

So how does Power10 help meet these essential needs? Firstly, by providing the enablement to optimise Hybrid Cloud, something so many enterprises are looking for to support their infrastructure modernisation, critical workloads and operations for success, whilst also driving the speed and agility that is prerequisite to fulfil and indeed forecast evolving customer demands, behaviours and expectations. Power10 delivers a consistent experience for elastic computing right across the IT environment enabling a supremely reliable and compatible IT architecture with no additional middleware or application refactoring required. It also affords a common Hybrid Cloud currency for enterprise workloads with the capability to extend across Power On-Premise and Power Virtual Server – whilst all supporting pay-per-use consumption. By running workloads where they're best suited, enterprises can both cut ‘time to market’ and enable continuous innovation at scale too. 

Security by Design

Power10 is secure to the core: with data available only to people authorised via encryption keys. This could not be more critical with cybersecurity threat vectors increasing in both size and sophistication of approach. Taking ransomware as just one example, attacks now happen on average an eye-watering every 11 seconds and with the frequency of attack growing 120% in 2020 compared to the previous year. Power10 helps address the challenge head on, securing your IT infrastructure from its core to the cloud whilst enabling the consolidation and automated management of cybersecurity and compliance using a single point of control - ever critical to manage the complexity of rapidly evolving and expanding governance and regulation needs that span different geographical areas. Putting this into context, there are now over 1000 different laws impacting privacy, security and compliance!

Data can be simply and seamlessly encrypted at every stage including to the extent of memory encryption at the processor level. This affords true end-to-end security that is fit to protect both the most sensitive of data and the most real-time of needs for ultimate performance; a great example being its application by the Alpine F1 sports team. Indeed IBM enables security safeguarding at every single level of the system stack, from the foundational hardware of processor and memory, to critical software such as the operating system, hypervisor, and applications too. 

Smart Technology – The AI Differentiator

Power10 will perform AI at inference using four new Matrix Math Assist (MMA) units in each core. No longer any need for deploying separate platforms for AI, this within core, built-in inferencing capability brings the power of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to wherever your data resides, which can be especially helpful for time-sensitive use cases, eradicating the time consumption and risk surrounding data movement. The result? Enterprise class AI with fast easy deployment, reduced complexity and risk, the capacity to train AI models anywhere, and faster insights reducing the time to move along the data volume to trusted data value continuum - vital to sustainable competitive advantage today.

Scalable Performance

And finally, blistering performance benchmarks are everywhere you look with the new Power10! From offering 2.5 x greater per core performance vs x86-based servers with over 50% better total capacity, through to setting a new world record SAP benchmark for 8-socket systems. And of course with 3 x the energy efficiency! So, when application landscapes such as SAP HANA grow alongside business demands, dynamic scaling options allow you to extend the platform quickly, cost-effectively and sustainably too.

On top of this, the new memory architecture is twice as available than existing industry-standard options with new integrated retry/recovery and self-healing features set to result in even fewer outages. Given the existing benchmark of achieving a maximum of 6 minutes downtime across an entire year – this new level of reliability performance is game changing, truly allowing you to access the data and systems you need 24/7 and 365 days of the year. 

Happy immersing! and all feedback and questions most welcomed, Sally.  

About the Author

Dr. Sally Eaves is a highly experienced Chief Technology Officer, Professor in Advanced Technologies and a Global Strategic Advisor on Digital Transformation specialising in the application of emergent technologies, notably AI, FinTech, Blockchain & 5G disciplines, for business transformation and social impact at scale. An international Keynote Speaker and Author, Sally was an inaugural recipient of the Frontier Technology and Social Impact award, presented at the United Nations in 2018 and has been described as the ‘torchbearer for ethical tech’ founding Aspirational Futures to enhance inclusion, diversity and belonging in the technology space and beyond.