IBM POWER9 on IBM Cloud: More Choice and Flexibility, On-Premise and Off

Cloud adoption isn’t a “one-cloud-fits-all” strategy. The conventional wisdom that an enterprise can lift, shift everything to a public cloud, then figure out the rest later—all while being agile and innovative—is misguided at best. The average enterprise business has 5+ clouds to straddle, 1,000+ cloud and SaaS applications to assimilate, and 20+ data sources for analysis. Not to mention the fact that before even considering cloud adoption, they—once upon a time—made massive investments into their traditional IT ecosystem that need to be leveraged and incorporated into their new cloud journey.

What we’re seeing now more than ever is a new and modern journey to cloud that takes a hybrid approach, where enterprises blend the value of their original investments and on-premise environments with new public and virtual private cloud estates.

To help clients succeed in today’s hybrid, multicloud reality, the IBM Cloud and IBM Power Systems teams are bringing the IBM POWER9 platform to the cloud with the new IBM Power Systems Virtual Server on IBM Cloud—available in select IBM Cloud data centers spring 2019.

Current AIX and IBM i clients can use IBM Power Systems Virtual Server on IBM Cloud for a number of workload scenarios, including disaster recovery, dev/test environments, and partial IT infrastructure moves. Our clients can not only stay competitive with the scaling of their infrastructure but also stay flexible with the management and capacity of their workloads both on- and off-premise. And since the infrastructure layer is identical, system administrators who run on-premise AIX and IBM i systems today can use their same tools, workflows, and enhancements in the cloud.

The new IBM Power Systems Virtual Server on IBM Cloud is particularly important for our providers of core banking platforms across the very competitive financial tech industry. These clients often face startup disruptors with porting their on-premise applications to the cloud in hopes of faster data mining. With IBM i access in the IBM Cloud, these clients will be able to 1) reach new markets with the global IBM Cloud data center footprint, 2) enable their core applications in the cloud without migration disruption, 3) leverage our leadership in cloud-native services, and 4) rely on our built-in security for highly sensitive, compliance-heavy data.

Your workload—where you want, when you want

We know many of our enterprise clients are still in the early phases of their cloud journey. The IBM Power Systems Virtual Server on IBM Cloud gives our clients more options to upgrade and expand—both on-premise and off-premise—all with on-demand ease from the IBM Cloud catalog. Clients choose and control the OS and choose and control their hourly or monthly billing options. IBM Cloud manages the setup and OS deployment. Like any other IBM Cloud IaaS component, clients will now be able to provision their Power systems with easy consumption and “as-a-service” billing experiences.

IBM Power Systems Virtual Server on IBM Cloud at a glance

• Up to 160 cores
• Up to 7 TB RAM
• Choose of AIX or IBM i OS
• Fiber Attached IBM Storewize V7000 Storage

Expanding IBM POWER9 use cases on IBM Cloud

IDC reports that enterprises in either proofs-of-concept or production systems with AI and deep learning applications have, at some point, hit an “infrastructure wall,” with 77.1% of respondents saying they ran into one or more limitations with their on-premise AI infrastructure. Among cloud users for cognitive workloads, a remarkable 90.3% of organizations ran into such limitations.

The IBM Cloud and IBM Power Systems teams are working hand-in-hand to deploy the raw performance of POWER9-based virtual servers with NVIDIA V100 GPUs on Linux for machine learning and artificial intelligence workloads. In the coming months, our clients will have the ideal infrastructure—rapidly scalable and on-demand—to quickly process their most compute-intensive AI workloads, like machine learning and training in the cloud

IBM POWER9 accelerated servers are the same IBM systems powering the world’s fastest supercomputers, including the U.S. Department of Energy’s Sierra and Summit system that analyzes and finds solutions for humanity’s most challenging problems and IBM’s Global High-Resolution Atmospheric Forecasting System (GRAF) that provides day-ahead weather forecasts for much of the globe.

Additional IBM Cloud offerings based on POWER9 accelerated servers will be available in the coming months. With IBM Power Systems and IBM Cloud working closely together to bring these offerings to life, we will provide enterprises a true hybrid cloud experience and build on our existing work to bring cloud flexibility to IBM Power Systems.

Increasing adoption over time

In 2018, IBM began introducing the IBM POWER9 platform in the IBM Cloud with the availability of PowerAI on IBM Cloud and SAP HANA on Power Systems on IBM Cloud.

It’s been exciting to work on these developments with our team and to see how our clients and partners are putting these services to the test. Whirlpool, the world’s leading major home appliance company, announced plans to leverage the flexibility and scalability of the IBM Cloud to run its SAP HANA environments, including around-the-clock insights into its 70 manufacturing global sites, its distribution and call centers, and other systems to provide worldwide access and increased efficiencies.

Additionally, IBM, NASA, and the SETI Institute collaborated during the NASA Frontier Development Lab to use PowerAI on IBM Cloud, delivered in partnership with Nimbix, to research emerging issues in space weather.

Learn more about IBM POWER9 on IBM Cloud

These new solutions are just starting to scratch the surface of what’s possible with IBM POWER9 in the IBM Cloud. Visit https://www.ibm.com/it-infrastructure/power/enterprise to learn more about IBM POWER9, or call us at 1-866-872-3902 to learn more about the new IBM Power Systems Virtual Server on IBM Cloud.