IBM is announcing the much-anticipated line of Power10 servers today, and the IT world is abuzz.
The IT Jungle blog, as just one example, said, “These machines have the technology that will have them in the IBM product catalog for the next three or four years and that will be technically and economically viable probably into 2030.”
The IBM Power10 processor was announced in August 2020, of course, and the first server platform, the E1080 server, came a year later in September 2021. Today IBM is expanding its Power10 lineup with four new systems, including the Power S1014, S1024, S1022 and E1050, which are being positioned by IBM to help solve enterprise use cases, including the growing need for machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI).
But the Power10 servers aren’t just for large organizations. The scale-out capability of these servers, especially the S1014 and S1024, make them the ideal platforms for smaller IBM i shops to make the strategic move to faster and more secure systems.
In the IBM news release about the new servers, Steve Sibley, Vice President, IBM Power Product Management, is quoted as saying, "Our new Power10 models offer clients a variety of flexible hybrid cloud choices with the agility and automation to best fit their needs, without sacrificing performance, security or resilience."
IBM Power is a RISC (reduced instruction set computer) based chip architecture that is competitive with other chip architectures including x86 from Intel and AMD. IBM’s Power hardware has been used for decades for running IBM’s AIX Unix operating system, as well as the IBM i operating system. Power has increasingly been used for Linux, specifically in support of Red Hat and its OpenShift Kubernetes platform.
Ken King, IBM’s General Manager, IBM Power, wrote a blog post calling the Power10 “The right compute architecture for today’s unpredictable and dynamic business climate.”
In his blog post, Ken wrote that the new servers provide value in three key ways:
Modernize applications to maximize value from data
The new Power10 processor-based systems are optimized to run mission-critical workloads (like core business applications and databases) and maximize the efficiency of containerized and cloud-native applications. An ecosystem with Red Hat OpenShift helps enable incremental innovation while cloud-native development is available with applications on AIX, IBM i and Linux. Each Power10 processor core has four Matrix Math Accelerators designed to improve performance of AI models and lower latency by running inferencing on the same server to access and analyze data faster.
Secure infrastructure to help defend against attacks
A hallmark of our Power10 processor-based systems is platform integrity from the processor to the cloud. The new Power S1014, Power S1022, Power S1024 and Power E1050 platforms support transparent memory encryption, enhanced isolation and Trusted Boot to help prevent emerging side-channel attacks from hackers. They are designed to enhance security across hybrid cloud environments without impacting performance of business-critical applications. We also included security standards that are intended to support cryptography advancements — such as quantum-safe cryptography and fully homomorphic encryption — to help protect today’s data from tomorrow’s bad actors.
Automate operations to help improve productivity
All Power10 processor-based servers have consistent automation and management to optimize workload deployments across hybrid cloud that are built on Red Hat OpenShift, managed with IBM Cloud Pak technology and automated with Red Hat Ansible. Clients can also separately purchase enterprise hybrid cloud application monitoring and observability with Instana on Power to anticipate issues and leverage resource optimization with Turbonomic on Power.
Are you abuzz yet? We are, and we’d like to talk about the value Power10 can provide to your organization. Just contact us for a free consultation.