Why and How to Make the Move to Power10
Transitioning to a new server is a major change but Power10 is worth the effort. Make the switch as smoothly as possible by leveraging Evolving Solutions’ expertise.
The IBM Power10 processor addresses the requirements of today’s organizations—including enhanced operational agility and flexibility, secure data and systems, continuous availability, and quickly transforming data into value.
There are several advances in technology that enable Power10 to fulfill these business needs. IBM Power E1080, the first server powered by the Power10 processor, features more than 1.5x the throughput compared to the previously most powerful server in the industry, Power E980. It can accommodate up to 240 Power10 cores and has 20-40% more performance per core than Power E980. Improvements also include improved sustainability, security, and AI.
The PCIe Gen5-ready Power E1080 also features up to 64TB of Open Memory Interface (OMI) to give organizations a performance edge. Further, Power10 can handle 4.1x more container throughput per core than x86 when running IBM Red Hat OpenShift, enabling businesses to respond faster to demand.
Why Move to Power10?
All this advanced technology in the Power10 processor and the Power E1080 benefits the business. The processor’s redundancy, agility, and scalability are unsurpassed. Power10 is self-healing as it has capability to detect and mitigate errors at the chip level, reducing application downtime. The OMI interface boosts memory life and adds the ability to detect errors.
To protect data, Power E1080 uses memory encryption at the processor level. Data is secured from core to cloud with no impact on performance. Whether the data is on public or private clouds or moving between those, the data is secure.
Organizations rely on insights and automation to steer the business to new markets. Power E1080 gives users a streamlined way to use these business tools. Extracting insights from sensitive data, wherever it resides, is done securely and quickly. AI inferencing is run directly in the core, yielding faster insights. Power E1080 users can leverage Watson services in the IBM Cloud to provide business-changing AI tools.
Enterprise users are seeing increased performance at lower cost. IBM maintains Power E1080’s energy consumption is 33% lower than Power E980 for the same workload; the CPUs are much faster, enabling clients to run the same workloads on fewer cores. This ultimately saves on licensing costs as well as power consumption, which can lower data center costs.
Software licensing savings help any organization’s budget. For example, if a software provider charges $50,000 per year per core for a software license and the organization can run a workload on just 12 Power E1080 cores instead of 20 cores, that client has just cut its licensing costs in half.
The Power10 processor also includes Matrix Math Accelerators (MMAs), that enable AI accelerator functionality as part of the chip, bringing the application closer to the data. This results in improved performance of any AI inferencing models.
There is enhanced security with Power10 through encryption and decryption at the memory level as well, which is beneficial for organizations using hybrid and public cloud. Based on feedback so far, clients are gaining many benefits from encryption but are not taking a performance hit, which is great for applications.
Last, but certainly not least—IBM’s flexible pricing applies to Power10. Organizations running cloud workloads or capacity-on-demand can take advantage of IBM’s pay-per-use consumption-based pricing model. Another reason Power E1080 is easy on the organization’s budget.
Power10 Readiness Considerations
Any organization looking to upgrade to Power E1080 must do analysis of its current system to ensure a smooth transition.
First, it is important to review the roadmap for your application portfolio that is currently being used. This involves looking at the current state of your applications portfolio and reviewing changes to your business that may impact applications and what your applications strategy is in the future.
To augment their equipment sales, for example, one of Evolving Solutions’ clients built an application to allow commercial clients to schedule shifts, do estimates remotely, keep track of billing and other tasks. The application was built in the cloud, but it had to interact with the client’s data center, which runs on Power. The traffic coming from the cloud needed to be accommodated thereby increasing server consumption.
Organizations should also consider applications they have, the value they provide to the business and how that might change over the next 18 months to two years. They need to consider any new demands on applications as well as where workloads are placed.
If your application roadmap includes a cloud-native platform, Power is a natural choice. IBM Red Hat OpenShift is a great way to do cloud-native application development on Power. The performance and security enhancements of Power10 are advantageous to hybrid cloud and public cloud applications.
And do not forget to assess the performance of your current server so you can compare it with the new server once it is installed. If the transition shows vast improvement, then great. But if the new server is slower, the organization needs to investigate why. Maybe code is not well suited to something that changed in the environment, or maybe there are errors that did not show up until the processing speed changed. Having a baseline of current performance helps to understand whether a move was a trigger or if it is something else.
Tap Into Expertise
Any organization contemplating a move to Power E1080 or looking to make that move does not have to do it alone; Evolving Solutions can help. During the investigative period, the architect team at Evolving Solutions will analyze the environment, get feedback on workloads and applications, and will diagram a server to pinpoint the best fit.
Evolving Solutions may be able to assist a client with transferring any IBM i licenses as well.
Once the decision to purchase a Power E1080 environment has been made, Evolving Solutions can migrate from your existing Power environment to the new Power10 system including planning, executing, and virtualization.
Transitioning to a new server is a major change and Power E1080 is worth the effort. Evolving Solutions’ expertise can help your organization make the switch as smoothly as possible.
Start your Power10 migration process with this readiness assessment.
