IBM Power10 Servers Tout 'Tremendous' Power and Efficiency

IBM today expanded its Power10 server line to include scalable and midrange systems that IBM Power VP Steve Sibley claims is “the most powerful one that’s ever been built.” IBM today expanded its Power10 server line to include scalable and midrange systems that IBM Power VP Steve Sibley claims is “the most powerful one that’s ever been built.” The company released the high-end version of its Power10 server last September. It then broadened the line to include the scale-out Power S1014, Power S1022, and Power S1024, which offer enterprise capabilities like on-demand capacity upgrades to SMBs and remote or branch office environments, along with a midrange version dubbed Power E1050. “While we call it a midrange, it actually scales almost as big as the biggest Intel-based platform,” Sibley told SDxCentral. “It actually delivers more performance than the eight socket version from Intel that we know customers would get from Dell or HP or Lenovo or any of the other Intel vendors.” IBM says its Power E1050 is a four socket server. The Power10 line is built with “more than two-times the number of cores and two-and-a-half- to three-times the performance of its predecessor,” advanced security and reliability features, and an artificial intelligence (AI) accelerator, Sibley explained. “A lot of our customers are starting to deploy AI modules next to their databases [and] their transaction workloads. And so we’ve actually integrated the ability to accelerate those workflows [and] make them go faster,” Sibley said, referencing credit scoring in the financial services industry and pricing in the retail and distribution industries where machine learning algorithms are used. The “tremendous amount of memory and compute capacity” packed in the midrange Power E1050 does two things: increases efficiency and reduces energy consumption. Sibley says it provides a “better economic entry point for very large scale workloads,” allowing customers to “consolidate and run lots of different workloads on the system,” and that offers sustainability and efficiency benefits, Sibley said. “If you run a system with a lot of workloads that means you need fewer systems, and fewer systems means less energy [and] less space in a data center,” he explained. “These systems help them reduce the energy consumption and space in their data centers.” Sibley noted that customers in Europe and the United States are approaching sustainable IT in very different ways. “In Europe, we’re seeing sustainability as more of a lead,” where customers come into meetings with questions specifically about how IBM can help them be more sustainable. “They want you to come in and talk about [sustainability],” Sibley said. But “in the U.S., it’s more of an added bonus” than a priority. “If a customer has a lot of systems it makes more difference to them. If the customer has a few systems it’s a little less critical to their overall ESG focus,” he added. According to IBM Power GM Ken King, all four new systems prevent emerging side-channel cyberattacks through transparent memory encryption and enhanced isolation. This augments security in hybrid-cloud environments without sacrificing performance, King explained in a blog. Other security features across the Power10 line include standards that support cryptography advancements like quantum-safe cryptography and homomorphic encryption.