How the IBM® Power® E1080 provides increased security, scalability, and resilience

From time to time, we invite industry thought leaders to share their opinions and insights on current technology trends to the IBM Systems IT Infrastructure blog. The opinions in these posts are their own, and do not necessarily reflect the views of IBM.

IT demands continue growing as cyber-threats, expenses and workload sizes increase, at the same time tolerance for downtime is razor thin. Defining your hybrid cloud strategy is the best solution for ensuring continuous operations to support business demands and outpace competition. With a mixture of on-premises and cloud infrastructure, you can run critical workloads more effectively while balancing cost efficiency, performance, and security requirements. A recent Forrester Consulting study found that enterprises are looking to unlock the benefits of a flexible yet secure cloud environment to empower their organizations.¹

I had the pleasure of reviewing the specs for the next generation of IBM Power servers, and I have found them to provide a seamless experience across both, on-premises infrastructure as well as cloud deployments. The series delivers the delicate balance that is so important to the demanding needs of today’s modern enterprises. After speaking with a team of subject matter experts, I believe the benefits of IBM Power can be categorized into the following four main pillars.

Scaling business operations for your needs

A recent enterprise hybrid cloud study by Forrester Consulting highlighted a critical need to prioritize infrastructure refreshes over other IT initiatives. In fact, Forrester found that 70% have delayed infrastructure refreshes at least a few times in the last five years or more (61% in 2019),¹ putting a business at risk for security vulnerabilities it can’t afford. To help clients achieve their goals, IBM has applied a flexible capacity, OPEX pricing model to their on-premises Power servers. This results in affording clients to pay only for the compute capacity used, effectively helping you preserve your cash flow, decrease IT costs, and enable efficient scaling of important workloads and applications.²

A Cloud Managed Service Provider in Germany that was looking to scale their business operations serves as a great case study for these benefits. This organization was able to reduce the number of servers in their data center by consolidating 11 x86 workloads onto one Power server, which saved energy, costs, and effectively lowered their carbon footprint. The number of departments required for system operations decreased by 50%. As a result, after deployment, their response time increased by 40% and they were able to provision new systems in only 30 minutes. In their own words, “Instead of troubleshooting, we can focus on our customers’ business challenges.”

Protect data at rest and in motion

Cyber hacks and ransomware attacks are growing exponentially, and in 2021 the average cost of a data breach exceeds $4 million. So unsurprisingly, when a bank needed confidence that their customers’ sensitive data would be protected from current and future vulnerabilities, they chose IBM Power. The new Power E1080 uses memory encryption at the processor level designed to support end-to-end security without impacting performance, protecting data at rest and in motion. In addition, Power10 processor-based systems can help you stay ahead of future threats with support from post-quantum cryptography enabling you to process data while it is encrypted by using fully homomorphic encryption.

Reduce application downtime with resilient architecture
The Information Technology Intelligence Corporation’s most recent study indicates that the hourly cost of downtime exceeds $300,000 for many enterprises. Overall, 42% of mid-sized and large enterprise reported that a single hour of downtime cost their firms over $1 million on average! Besides the cost of the actual downtime, there are also incalculable costs to brand reputation – imagine if a bank’s server was to go down during a $10 million stock transaction. The Power E1080 offers advanced recovery, self-healing, and diagnostic capabilities. These proficiencies reduce application downtime and deliver two times better memory reliability, availability, and serviceability than industry standard DIMMs,³ providing a reliable and resilient foundation for your most important business needs.

Hear from Kaveh Naderi, Systems Chief Architect, about how IBM Power servers, built with the Power10 processor, are engineered to minimize outages and downtime.

Extract insights faster with AI inferencing capabilities

Data sprawl is real and growing so fast that efficient and secure data analysis is more important than ever. The Power E1080 processor is built with matrix math accelerator (MMA) engines on every core, which means you can run AI inferencing and extract insights from the most sensitive data where it resides, without the time and risk of having to move it to a separate accelerated server.

The healthcare industry provides a great case-study for the impact of this AI inferencing capability. For example, a healthcare clinic generates data exponentially, digitizing millions of documents for analysis and diagnosis. Typically, files needed to be scaled down first, which compromised accuracy and speed. The clinic was looking to deploy a robust AI solution to assist with analyzing their CT scans. With the MMA engines built directly on the processing chip of the IBM Power E1080, computational analysis can be completed on the original files, delivering faster and more accurate results.

Experience what Power makes possible

When it comes to ensuring continuous operations and keeping up with new digital demands and security risks, you need to know your core applications, data stores and processes that run your business won’t go down. The latest addition to the IBM Power family is designed to deliver more security, flexibility, and automation for more agile IT operations, freeing up resources to respond faster to your business demands.

>> Read the full ITIC 2021 Global Server Hardware, Server OS Security Report
>>Dive deeper into the Power E1080 capabilities with an interactive digital experience and augmented reality.