What’s possible with POWER8 Take advantage of world-leading performance, openness, and cost-efficiency.
What’s possible with POWER8 Take advantage of world-leading performance, openness, and cost-efficiency.
Across all industries, the rate of change has increased rapidly in recent years. With data as the new natural resource,
organizations are finding new efficiencies to improve their operations and new opportunities to grow. At the same time,
they face new threats from emerging competitors that can disrupt entire industries in the blink of an eye.
To stay ahead in a fast moving world, your organization needs to be increasingly flexible to meet whatever challenges the
future may bring. Your systems must be capable of generating rapid insight from huge amounts of structured and unstructured
information, and your IT infrastructure must extend seamlessly to link securely with partners, stakeholders and customers.
This e-book gives an overview of the advantages of POWER8 processor-based systems for four key use-cases across industries:
High-Transaction Workloads Security and Compliance Mission-Critical Workloads Big Data
Summary
Organizations in every industry
are under pressure to provide
larger sets of products and
services at lower costs. Equally,
customers, employees, shareholders
and citizens have increasing
expectations of fast, seamless and
reliable service.
Retailers must process large
volumes of online and mobile
transactions rapidly and reliably,
while gathering huge volumes of
multi-dimensional data to model
customer interactions.
Choosing Linux on POWER8 versus x86, Allegiant Travel shrunk its core count by 75% and saved $1.2 million.
High-transaction workloadsIn travel and transportation, the
internet of things (IoT) is bringing
vast increases in the volume and
speed of real-time data processing.
In banking and finance, the
growing trend for personalization
and customization is dramatically
expanding the number of IT
transactions. Equally, customers
increasingly expect to be able to
monitor and manage their accounts
and portfolios in real time and from
any device.
In healthcare, personalized
medicine and growing
sophistication in research
techniques, diagnostic tests and
medical equipment are driving a
boom in data volumes.
Government bodies must gear up to
ensure the faster and more efficient
provision of services to growing
populations, especially in smarter
cities powered by IoT technologies
that will depend on the real-time
processing and analysis of huge
volumes of data.
IBM Power Systems offers
ultra-reliable systems with the
scalability to manage the highest
peaks of transactional processing.
The latest POWER8 processors
deliver exceptional advantages
over x86-architecture servers,
delivering greater performance in
a smaller and more cost-effective
footprint.
Upgrading from POWER7® will
deliver the same performance in
less than half the footprint, cutting
infrastructure cost and complexity.
With its superior architecture,
threading and cache structure,
POWER8 can cut per-core software
licenses by up to 50 percent.
High-transaction workloads on
open-source databases, including
EnterpriseDB, MongoDB and Redis,
excel on Power Systems servers
running Linux.
As workloads move to the cloud,
the ability to run multiple operating
systems—including Linux—makes
Power Systems the ideal platform.
Spikes in demand can be managed
automatically by shifting workload
seamlessly between owned servers
in the enterprise data center or
private clouds and rented servers in
the SoftLayer® cloud.
IBM Power Systems also offers Elastic
Capacity on Demand to provide
cloud-like consumption models.
Organizations can activate and
deactivate processors as demand
rises and falls, maintaining the
optimal balance between price
and performance.
Staples cut TCO for IT by upgrading to the latest Power Systems servers, accelerating page‑loading by 55% to offer greater speed and convenience to online customers.
Organizations must secure
transactions, fight fraud, maintain
business credibility by securing their
online presence, and protect against
IT security threats.
They must also remain accessible
to customers and partners, and
connect to third-party systems less
secure than their own. Maintaining
the right balance between security
and openness depends on a robust,
centralized approach to monitoring
and managing access to data.
Retail organizations store huge
amounts of valuable and potentially
sensitive data on customer
preferences and purchasing history.
In travel and transportation,
keeping goods and people moving
smoothly is increasingly dependent
on secure, trusted data, exchanged
securely with partners.
Banking and finance are among the
most heavily regulated industries
worldwide, and their reputation
A major ocean cruise company upgraded to Power Systems for its scale‑out Linux environment, rejecting an x86 alternative in the public cloud in favor of the enhanced security, reliability and compliance benefits of POWER8.
Security and compliancecan be destroyed by any breach of
data security that reveals sensitive
financial information.
Healthcare is also highly regulated
from research, testing and drug
manufacture through to patient care
and electronic medical records.
And in an age of digital identities,
government organizations must
protect but also securely share huge
amounts of extremely valuable
information on citizens.
IBM Power Systems continues to
offer the gold standard in reliability
and data protection. Offering a
high-performance, highly scalable
infrastructure with security built
into every level, the latest POWER8
processor-based servers also enable
the rapid processing of vast volumes
of data required for applications
such as anti-money-laundering and
real-time fraud detection.
For additional performance,
organizations can use the new
CAPI feature to enable specialty
accelerators to share memory
with POWER8 processors for
minimal latency.
Mature IBM PowerVM®
virtualization technology provides
a secure environment for IBM
AIX®, IBM i and Linux applications,
enabling multiple sensitive systems
to run side-by-side on the same
hardware for reduced complexity
and cost. PowerVM is the only
hypervisor with zero documented
vulnerability exposures, making
Power Systems the ideal choice
for both scale-up and scale-out
architectures.
For organizations in highly regulated
industries, IBM PowerSC™ provides
a security and compliance solution
that is optimized for virtualized
environments, enabling them to
meet the same security levels as
physical servers and improving their
auditability.
Optimization for high utilization
keeps the physical infrastructure
compact and cost-effective.
Logicalis uses POWER8 processor‑based servers in geographically separated US data centers to provide enterprise‑class performance, availability and security for its customers’ mission‑critical applications.
Reliable IT operations have never
been more important; even short
outages are costly and damaging.
Where once only ERP and financials
were critical, today’s interconnected
markets also require constant
availability for communications,
sales and decision-support systems.
Organizations need IT infrastructures
that enable users to analyze data
and serve customers or citizens
without missing a beat.
Retailers must always be able to
deliver the right goods to the right
stores at the right time, and to
accept payments on all channels.
In travel and transportation,
delayed arrivals or deliveries cause
financial and reputational damage,
particularly as automation and the
use of IoT technology grows.
Customer confidence in service
availability is critically important
for banks, while even sub-second
Mission-critical workloadsinterruptions in financial trading can
mean the difference between profit
and loss.
For frontline healthcare providers,
protecting mission-critical workloads
can literally be a matter of life or
death.
For government organizations,
reliable citizen services, public
safety and disaster response depend
on keeping critical systems and
data available around the clock.
At UF Health Shands Hospital in Florida, clustered Power Systems servers provide outstanding reliability for the mission‑critical Epic system, supporting 24/7 patient care.
IBM Power Systems solutions
continue to offer the class-leading
reliability, availability and security
features that make them a fixture in
many global organizations requiring
the highest levels of protection for
mission-critical systems.
Built to provide resilience at every
level, Power Systems servers feature
chipkill memory with advanced
error checking and correction (ECC)
technology that isolates data from
the impact of a single memory chip
failure.
IBM PowerHA® SystemMirror®
for both the AIX and i operating
systems now integrates server
clustering technology into the kernel
and the OS to improve the speed of
response and enable faster failover
in the event of an unexpected
failure.
For enterprises, the solution
supports stretched clusters that can
span multiple physical locations
and hybrid on-premises/cloud
infrastructures.
With Power’s seamless connection
to the cloud, organizations can
connect mission-critical on-premises
data and systems with mobile
and cloud-native applications,
leveraging standard REST APIs
for easy development and
management.
This ability to extend processing
into the public cloud supports
organizations that need to keep
systems running at all times, no
matter what happens.
Fransabank runs its new core banking system on Power Systems, boosting performance by 40% while cutting 3 hours from overnight batches and saving 5 hours at month‑end.
As digitization gains pace,
commercial and government
organizations are gathering,
processing and storing more data
from more sources than ever
before—at an ever-growing rate.
Organizations must absorb huge
volumes of data at high speed,
manipulate and understand
it, and then use advanced
analytics to unlock its full value
for decision-support and real-time
operational visibility.
Big dataRetailers that understand what
motivates their customers can
deliver the right offers at the right
time to win sales and build loyalty.
In travel and transportation,
analyzing large volumes of data
helps to optimize logistics and
ensure on-time delivery.
High-frequency trading and the
personalization of financial products
are driving extreme data growth
in banking and financial services.
Likewise, the advent of personalized
medicine based on genomics
and the growing use of high-tech
diagnostics are causing data
volumes to explode in healthcare.
Government organizations are
exposed to big data as they capture
more information on growing
populations and introduce new
systems to serve citizens more
effectively and efficiently, including
sensors and other monitoring
systems in smart cities.
Zato Health uses Linux on Power Systems to tackle big data challenges. Accelerating analytics processes from 1000s of hours down to just 30 minutes helps improve patient outcomes.
IBM Power Systems delivers
exceptional performance for
analytics workloads, helping
organizations to gain insight faster
from larger and more complex
multi-source data sets.
The latest POWER8 processors offer
4X the threads, 4X the memory
bandwidth and 4X the cache of x86
processors. OpenPOWER innovations
such as CAPI enable accelerators
to deliver order-of-magnitude
improvements in analytics and
machine learning. Popular open-
source analytical tools offer
exceptional performance on
POWER8; for example, Apache
Spark offers 2X the per-core
performance versus x86.
In big data, a key challenge is to
balance performance with costs.
Power Systems helps by providing
micro-services and APIs to facilitate
the connection of on-premises
data with economical and flexible
cloud-based tools.
Using OpenStack and a large
ecosystem of open-source data
services, developers can leverage
self-service and automated
delivery of database- and
analytics-as-a-service solutions.
In a digital, data-driven world,
the race is on to identify and
seize opportunities. POWER8
processors deliver the performance,
cost efficiency, capacity and
cloud-readiness to give your
organization a head start.
Memorial University of Newfoundland uses Power Systems to design personalized care for high‑risk patients, enabling an 83% improvement in results turnaround time.
Please Recycle
© Copyright IBM Corporation 2016
IBM Corporation New Orchard Road Armonk, NY 10504
Produced in the United States of America August 2016
IBM, the IBM logo, ibm.com, Power Systems™ and POWER8© are trademarks of International Business Machines Corp., registered in many jurisdictions worldwide. Other product and service names might be trademarks of IBM or other companies. A current list of IBM trademarks is available on the web at “Copyright and trademark information” at http://www.ibm.com/legal/copytrade.shtml.
This document is current as of the initial date of publication and may be changed by IBM at any time. Not all offerings are available in every country in which IBM operates.
It is the user’s responsibility to evaluate and verify the operation of any other products or programs with IBM products and programs. THE INFORMATION IN THIS DOCUMENT IS PROVIDED “AS IS” WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING WITHOUT ANY WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND ANY WARRANTY OR CONDITION OF NON-INFRINGEMENT. IBM products are warranted according to the terms and conditions of the agreements under which they are provided.
The client is responsible for ensuring compliance with laws and regulations applicable to it. IBM does not provide legal advice or represent or warrant that its services or products will ensure that the client is in compliance with any law or regulation. Statements regarding IBM’s future direction and intent are subject to change or withdrawal without notice, and represent goals and objectives only.
Visit ibm.com/systems/power/hardware/power8 for more
information on how Power Systems can help organizations
across all industries to run high-transaction workloads, boost
security and compliance, strengthen mission-critical services
and accelerate insight from big data.
For more information