New IBM Power Offerings Highlight Flexibility, Security

Marketplace education is never a short-term exercise, at least not for effectively run system vendors. Instead, a drumbeat of announcements, updates and testimonials clarifies the value of existing platforms and solutions. Those same narratives can highlight evolutionary changes that further enhance enterprise customers’ understanding.
A new blog by Ken King, GM of IBM Power, uses several of these points to discuss the current and upcoming capabilities of the company’s Power-based servers, cloud offerings, development tools and subscription services. Let’s consider his post in detail.
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Enhancing Current Capabilities
Ken King begins by focusing on IBM Power’s longstanding leadership in supporting mission-critical workloads that demand superior availability, reliability, security and performance.
In 2023, IBM Power plans to deliver “Frictionless hybrid cloud experiences delivered in new and enhanced flexible consumption models; mitigating risk for business resilience with cloud controls and data protection optimized for the most highly regulated industries; and saving costs with energy efficient IT.”
He also makes an important point: that IBM is developing Power solutions according to imperatives that customers and partners are emphasizing, including digitally transforming key business processes and workloads.
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Future Focus Areas
As a result, the company plans to prioritize four key focus areas in 2023:
Advance capabilities for core business workloads – Continue strategic investments on AIX, IBM i and Linux operating environments. These include new offerings, like Hyper Protect Crypto Services for AIX and Linux on Power Virtual Server and a 24-core dual chip module on IBM Power S1014 servers which is designed to help small-to-medium sized businesses maximize their investments in Oracle Database Standard Edition 2 (SE2).
Grow share in SAP HANA on Power – King focused on the core performance and memory RAS (reliability, availability, security) features that IBM Power servers offer compared to x86-based systems. IBM is growing SAP HANA on Power10 with 2 to 6 TB bundled solutions for small- and medium-sized businesses. Power systems can support SAP HANA instances from 2 to 40 TB, and IBM offers a full range of Technology Lifecycle Services designed to support SAP KPIs.
Modernization in banking and other industries – IBM’s focus on developing modern solutions and services for banks and financial services is well established (the IBM Cloud for Financial Services is a good example). In regard to IBM Power, the company is expanding its 20+ year partnership with Temenos Group AG, a financial software provider used by two-thirds of the world’s top 1,000 banks.
Later in 2023, IBM clients will be able to modernize their Temenos Transact core banking workloads utilizing Red Hat OpenShift on Power10. In addition, IBM Consulting will provide services to update, migrate and operate Temenos Transact/IBM Power with Red Hat OpenShift as an on-premises SaaS-like OPEX solution.
Flexible subscription services – A challenge with well-established server platforms is staffing IT teams and management. IBM has approached this issue through a number of efforts, including automating/simplifying IT tools and processes.
King cited the company’s application development and modernization tool, IBM i Modernization Engine for Lifecycle Integration (Merlin), which is now available as a subscription offering to help customers streamline ERP. Using Merlin, IBM i developers can easily access automated conversion of fixed-format to free-format RPG, built-in security practices, and modern development processes and tools such as Git and Jenkins.
Final Analysis
Overall, Ken King’s blog provides an excellent overview of the current state of IBM Power, as well as insights into what organizations and markets can expect from the company during the next 12-24 months.
As a result, it accomplishes the author’s and IBM’s core goals—to inform customers and partners about IBM Power’s continuing evolution, to detail the business and performance benefits they can expect to achieve and to explain why that matters practically and strategically.
For more information, also see: Digital Transformation Guide
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