End of Service Announcement for the Beta Program for Virtual Servers for VPC on POWER

IBM has decided to consolidate its Power Systems offerings in the IBM Cloud.

As a result, we are redirecting efforts for IBM Cloud Virtual Servers for VPC on POWER to the existing IBM Power Systems Virtual Servers offering, which has seen significant demand since being released to market in June 2019. IBM Power Systems Virtual Servers offers AIX, IBM i operating systems, and BYOL model for both Red Hat and SUSE Linux. Power Virtual Servers can connect to IBM Cloud resources via the Direct Link service.

IBM Power Systems AC922, which powers the two fastest supercomputers today, will continue to be available for on-premises deployment in client data centers. They are also available for rent in the cloud from IBM Business Partners, including Cirrascale and Nimbix.

Clients looking to take advantage of GPU processing in the IBM Cloud can continue to select from several performance-level GPU card options on our x86-based processor bare metal and virtual servers, including the following:

NVIDIA Tesla M60: Fundamental enterprise performance for virtualization and professional graphics.
NVIDIA Tesla K80: Reliable enterprise performance for introductory AI computing.
NVIDIA Tesla P100: Essential performance for growing advanced AI and HPC capabilities.
NVIDIA Tesla V100 (16GB and 32GB): Maximum performance for progressive deep learning workloads.
NVIDIA Tesla T4 (Coming soon): Precision-tuned performance for advanced AI inference, VDI desktops and workstations, and graphics enhanced by RTX Cores.

The popular IBM AI software solutions—such as Visual Insights, Watson Machine Learning-Accelerator, Watson Machine Learning-Community Edition, and H2O Driverless AI—can all run on both Power and x86 based infrastructures.

Important dates to know

End of Marketing (EOM) Date: June 2, 2020

New instances of VPC on POWER will no longer be able to be provisioned.
Existing VPC on POWER clients who have instances provisioned as of the EOM date will continue to be able to work with those virtual servers and provision new virtual servers until the EOS date.
For a period of 90 days after the End of Marketing Date, all existing instances will continue to be available on the Services dashboard in the IBM Cloud console.

End of Support (EOS) Date: August 22, 2020

Any instance still provisioned as of the End of Support Date will be deleted. Please extract data that is still desired as soon as possible.

Alise Spence

Power Systems Cloud Offering Manager

AI transforms the IT support experience

5 min read - We know that understanding clients’ technical issues is paramount for delivering effective support service. Enterprises demand prompt and accurate solutions to their technical issues, requiring support teams to possess deep technical knowledge and communicate action plans clearly. Product-embedded or online support tools, such as virtual assistants, can drive more informed and efficient support interactions with client self-service. About 85% of execs say generative AI will be interacting directly with customers in the next two years. Those who implement self-service search…

Bigger isn’t always better: How hybrid AI pattern enables smaller language models

5 min read - As large language models (LLMs) have entered the common vernacular, people have discovered how to use apps that access them. Modern AI tools can generate, create, summarize, translate, classify and even converse. Tools in the generative AI domain allow us to generate responses to prompts after learning from existing artifacts. One area that has not seen much innovation is at the far edge and on constrained devices. We see some versions of AI apps running locally on mobile devices with…

Chat with watsonx models

3 min read - IBM is excited to offer a 30-day demo, in which you can chat with a solo model to experience working with generative AI in the IBM® watsonx.ai™ studio. In the watsonx.ai demo, you can access some of our most popular AI models, ask them questions and see how they respond. This gives users a taste of some of the capabilities of large language models (LLMs). AI developers may also use this interface as an introduction to building more advanced…

IBM has decided to consolidate its Power Systems offerings in the IBM Cloud.

Important dates to know

More from Artificial intelligence

AI transforms the IT support experience

Bigger isn’t always better: How hybrid AI pattern enables smaller language models

Chat with watsonx models

IBM Newsletters