Why I would continue to bet on IBM Power Systems

When you look at concentrated high compute, data churning systems in the market today, you will still find the name of IBM very much figure amongst the leaders out there. While the Mainframe continues to reign in the BFSI sector and other highly intensive online transaction processing domains, IBM’s midrange powerhouse, Power Systems, still hold forte running mission critical workloads for thousands of clients across the globe while continuing to see the near demise of its competitive siblings such as Sun Solaris, Tandem NonStop, OpenVMS and a few other midrange servers. Let alone becoming redundant, these Servers have now thrived with modernization features thanks to IBMs sustained focus on this segment by continued R&D and investments into POWER core processors based on RISC architecture. IBM Power Systems have security built in at all layers in the system stack — hypervisor, OS, firmware, systems, processor. With accelerated encryption built into the chip, data is protected in motion and at rest since the chip has accelerated encryption built in as a standard feature. One of the many reasons why Power Systems will continue to hold sway!

A few years ago, leading CSPs (such as AWS, Azure and GCP) realized the criticality and importance of these systems in core business needs and an organizations’ inability to do away with this platform altogether. They now see that the underlying architecture of the cores and their tight coupling with the OS, provide Power Systems with a technical advantage over other platforms for certain types of workloads.?Hence, having realized this, such CSPs have of late strategized with IBM and come up with ways to ensure that they can have this platform coexist in their ecosystems with their more voluminous x86 systems. While AWS has tied up with Connectria in the US to make Power Systems available on the cloud, Skytap, an independent company has built a reputation for itself by venturing into this unchartered territory bigtime with their solutions for AIX, Linux, IBMi (erstwhile AS/400 or iSeries) on the Azure cloud. GCP has also caught into the foray and have partnered with Converge Technology Solutions to release their set of offerings called IP4G based on the IBM Power System platform. IBM on their part, have their own proprietary offering, IBM Power Virtual Server (PowerVS) which provides that much needed boost to businesses who are contemplating to either migrate completely to cloud or as is observed in large enterprise client environments, moving non-mission critical workloads to the cloud, and retaining their core applications on-premises, thereby ushering in true hybrid cloud ecosystems.

In this age of modernization, the Power Systems platform can be leveraged by an array of product solutions, and it supports many of the next gen languages such as PHP, Java, Node.js, Python, .NET, and C++ as called out in the illustration above. Interesting to note is that with Red Hat OpenShift, you can even containerize your applications running on these servers running RHEL. Containers as we know are the growing and preferred destination for hybrid cloud applications. Many whitepapers have been written on the benefits and value that a client derives by running SAP HANA workloads on Power and IBM has a significant number of clients in this space. ?What is even more interesting to note is that IBM has ensured that by making their Power Systems available on the top three cloud service provider Marketplace (AWS, Azure and GCP), they have provided the much-needed impetus to thrive and remain relevant in these modern times where everything and anything in IT converges on that one buzzword, ‘cloud’.?By putting these systems on the cloud, IBM has given a new lease of life to not just its Power Systems, but more importantly, its client base of thousands of IT business leaders out there spread across multiple industries (yes, Power Systems cater across business lines) who needed to make some challenging decisions on the platform to remain relevant for their business growth.

Let us now look at some real-life examples, where IBM Power Systems have provided the much-needed edge to companies seeking true business value from their IT. Here is an example of their continued usage in ‘modernized’ terms – In this world of social media, there is an abundance of data available therein that can be mined for business targeted purposes.?An IBMi client running Power Systems, Caixa Geral de Depósitos France extended its banking application with machine learning capabilities to include the ability to retrieve information from available social data, thereby gaining deeper insights into prospective client habits and patterns, enabling them to improve the odds of making good decisions about granting financial loans to such prospects. Norwegian Air Ambulance Foundation use ‘IBM i’ and the inherent ‘DB2 on i’ as the system and database for their HemsWX Weather Camera System, which collects and distributes weather data all over Norway and Denmark to optimize rescue operations! This is another perfect example of Power Systems being used in earlier unimagined ways, mixing the longstanding reliability with the new needs of agility and flexibility of systems, and creating a perfect ecosystem for today’s world where information is meant be available at your fingertips. Another buzz word doing the round in todays’ world of modernization is – block chain. A 70-year-old Belgian wine retailer, Wijnen Van Maele, a family-owned business, by moving to a cloud-based version of IBMi on an IBM Power System S924, and their own blockchain application on IBMi, found that they can demonstrate, with hard data, just where their wine has been, from grape to bottle to glass. In their IBM case study, the Business Leads predict that traceability will be a crucial selling point for many wine distributors and retailers and the near future and by doing this they have ensured that they can remain ahead of the curve. Their new e-commerce system running on Power Systems-IBMi is using blockchain to track various aspects of the wine, including the quality of the grapes and the length of time the wine has sat in the bottles.

For those who are learning AI as in its primacy of late through ChatGPT, et all, I would like to call out that IBM was one of the pioneers about 25 years ago making waves with IBM Deep Blue, that specialized, purpose-built computer, capable of examining 200 million moves per second, or 50 billion positions, in the three minutes allocated for a single move in a stipulated game of chess. In 1997, world reigning Chess Champion, Gary Kasparov graciously acknowledged defeat by IBM’s AI driven Big Blue in a closely watched encounter. IBM continued to pour in its continual learnings from decades researching in this AI space, with Watson, its path breaking computer system which was initially developed to answer questions on the popular quiz show Jeopardy.?In 2011, Watson using advanced natural language processing, competed on Jeopardy! against champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, winning the first prize of USD 1mn. The world took notice and AI was here to stay!

Modern data science recommends building AI Foundation Models given that AI can improve compliance checks by 1000x. Today, IBM has watsonx.ai on Power and integration with watsonx.data via Storage Fusion HCI, making it a combination that would pave the way for clients to truly engage AI to meet end business transformational objectives. A hospital in Thailand leverages AI on IBM Power10 to automate manual pathology processes to help more patients in time. IBM Power has also helped a leading Financial Institution in Switzerland, accelerate its existing AI solutions with IBM Power10, enabling the institution to build superior IT Operations frontiers and thereby detect frauds more efficiently. How is that as a riposte for being called a legacy monolith proprietary system by some?

Many articles and reams of text have been written by tech evangelists about the demise of the two core operating systems than run bulk of the workloads on Power Systems - AIX and IBMi. Let us focus on IBMi, the AS/400 as it is still referenced by many clients. About a decade ago, many were prophesying about the death of the ‘AS/400’. Suffice to say, even today, at this very moment, there are more than over 80,000?companies (100+ countries) globally across all industries using the IBMi for their business needs.?Globally, more than 10,000 banks run their mission critical workloads on the IBMi Operating System which runs on the Power Systems platform. A staggering ~400,000 IBMi instances (or LPARs) run across the globe! In x86 comparisons, which may not be a substantial number, but when you realistically look at the compute statistics, that’s where the fun begins – per IBM, an IBM Power customer projected that they could consolidate an industry-standard transactional database running across 126 x86-based servers down to two IBM Power E1080 servers! Server energy cost reductions could potentially be in the range 70-80 percent not forgetting the potentially significant software license cost reductions that kick in when licenses are calculated by the core!

Make no mistake, many out there try to compare Power Systems to those running x86 workloads and plan swapping these legacy workloads and that is a wrong step driven by an apple to orange comparison.?Both architectures have their own individual identities, qualities, values, and purposes, and cater to those unique business needs for which they are designed.?While comparing the technology and scope, one should always be cognizant and aware of the business requirement or the application functionality where the platform currently fits into.?For instance, you just cannot compare a user mobile application technology against a huge transactional server application – their workload management dynamics are poles apart and they operate in completely different settings catering to different business needs.?No wonder, that most large enterprise customer today still go with SAP HANA on Power, Oracle on Power– Oracle DB and App workloads, and Red Hat OpenShift and IBM Cloud Pak solutions on Power solutions. Because, when it comes to Performance, Reliability, Scalability, Security and Sustainability (PRSSS) these machines are second to none. Banking clients today are looking at how they can their level of fraud detection, and

While I would agree that Power Systems are a bit expensive than other product platforms out there in the market, from a business point of view, it's worth it in the long run because an IT Business Leader should consider business value in terms of ROI and the renowned PRSSS features that Power Systems provide even today. And if you are ever faced with internal business dynamics and strategic directions to move these ‘so called legacy’ workloads to Cloud, to keep up with the organizations goal of modernization, moving such workloads ‘as is’ to cloud (called re-host) is a step in the right direction with minimal to zero risk.

Wipro provides wrapper solutions (such as re-host, re-engineer, re-architect, re-new) that cater to migrating AIX and IBMi workloads to cloud (and provide managed services thereafter) across three leading CSPs – IBM PowerVS; Skytap on Azure; and IBM Power for Google aka IP4G - an offering from Converge. All these solutions provide businesses with a pay-as-you-go pricing model, allowing them to optimize costs by scaling resources based on actual usage (OPEX model). We even provide consultancy services to help you make informed decisions based on your existing IT footprint, business strategy and direction thereby enabling your Power System journey to either of these CSPs a well-planned strategic direction serving the best interests of your business users and end clients.

On a parting note, a bit of trivia – Did you know that a cluster of the same IBM Power9 processors that drive IBM Power Systems run two of the world’s top 6 supercomputers - Summit and Sierra. The U.S.-European TOP500 project (Jun-2023 list), a bi-annual ranking of supercomputers, positions IBM’s Summit in fifth place – the IBM AC922 system clocks a speed of 148.6 petaflops using 4,356 nodes, each equipped with two 22-core Power9 CPUs, and six NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs (2,414,592 cores).?Another IBM build supercomputer, Sierra, takes sixth place per the June 2020 rankings, with computational performance tipping at 94.6 petaflops generated through its architecture equipped with two Power9 CPUs and four NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs in each of its 4,320 nodes (1,572,480 cores). Sierra is specifically designed for assessing the performance of nuclear weapon systems.?And in 2021, IBM launched Power10 processors, their latest core architecture which deliver 20-30 percent higher performance per core than its predecessor. Game ON, Power ON!