An overview of the latest exciting news and direction from the IBM Power team.

A recent blinded internal survey of IBM Power client CIOs, CTOs, IT directors, IT admins and developers tells us that their top business strategies revolve around improving business processes in real-time—using technology in more innovative ways to gain a competitive advantage and better secure their information. [1] Other major objectives include ensuring superior total cost of ownership, improving the performance of their systems, increasing automation for more productivity and enhancing the energy efficiency of data centers.

It is well known (but worth reiterating) that IBM Power is designed for mission-critical workloads that require superior availability, reliability, security and performance. In other words, it’s the engine that fuels our clients’ businesses.

Building off a strong year fueled by Power10 innovation, we are doubling down on our commitment to help companies modernize with this powerful engine in 2023. We will do this in an agile fashion throughout the year by unlocking speed and innovation with 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 helping to save cost with increasingly more energy-efficient systems. 

Furthermore, we owe it to our clients and partners to demonstrate that we hear where they need the most help and want the most innovation. To that end, we are prioritizing our focus and investments in 2023 across four critical areas to accelerate our clients’ digital transformation imperatives. I am excited to share those below, in addition to multiple significant capabilities and innovations for this quarter that our clients and partners can begin to benefit from.

Innovate key capabilities for core business workloads

In 2023, we are committed to continue to strategically invest in three operating environments on IBM Power: AIX, IBM i and Linux.

For example, we just rolled out the availability of Hyper Protect Crypto Services for AIX and Linux on Power Virtual Server. IBM Cloud Hyper Protect Crypto Services is a 3-in-1 solution that provides enterprises with the following:

• A single-tenant, hybrid cloud key management service
• A Hardware Security Module (HSM) in the cloud
• Multicloud key orchestration with Unified Key Orchestrator (a part of Hyper Protect Crypto Services)

IBM Cloud Hyper Protect Crypto Services enables clients to control their cloud data encryption keys (DEKs) and Cloud Hardware Security Module. Built on LinuxONE technology, the service runs on a secured enclave so that no one—including cloud administrators—can access another user’s keys.

Separately, to help small-to-midsize clients running core workloads on Oracle Database Standard Edition 2 (SE2) maximize their investments, we are rolling out a 24-core dual chip module on IBM Power S1014. With the S1014 running Oracle Database SE2, clients can take advantage of best-in-class reliability and security [2], and reduce total application cost per database instance by up to 33% compared to Intel’s 4th Generation Xeon Scalable Processors, which can lead to a reduction in the overall number of servers needed to improve sustainability. [3]

Grow with SAP HANA on Power

With end-to-end security, maximal uptime and reliability including more than 99.999% availability, 2x better memory RAS than generally-available 2666-3200MHz DIMMs [4], and up to 2.5x better per-core performance than compared x86 servers [5], IBM Power continues to excel in running SAP HANA workloads greater than 6TB for clients’ infrastructure needs. When Bosch moved its SAP solutions to Power10 from Power9, it saw a 20% reduction in energy use and up to 75% performance improvement. 

To support small- and medium-sized businesses, in particular, IBM is growing our SAP HANA on Power10 offering by now making high-performance, scalable 2-6 TB bundles available, along with added-value services to address our clients’ workload requirements.

The entire Power10 portfolio—all of which is now supported for SAP HANA, including its 2-socket and mid-range servers—now also includes Live Partition Mobility with virtual persistent memory. This feature is designed to reduce downtime by dynamically moving SAP workloads between systems while also enabling fast SAP HANA restart.  

Leading the market with SAP HANA OLAP scalable instances at 40TB [6], IBM Power is designed to support companies’ workloads throughout their entire growth journeys. Moreover, IBM Technology Lifecycle Services provides support and services across the solution lifecycle. This includes design and deployment services to help clients implement flexible virtualization and capacity management to support business requirements and SAP KPIs, proactive support for issues resolution and prevention, and optimization services to enable clients to analyze and tune SAP HANA on Power, storage and software for optimized performance.

Banking and industry modernization

Today, an architecture based on open hybrid cloud offers financial institutions the flexibility necessary for business innovation and improved client experiences, while also addressing security and cost concerns.

One way we are helping banks and financial organizations to accelerate their digital transformations is by expanding on our 20+ year partnership with Temenos Group AG, a leading financial software provider.[7] Soon, clients will be able to modernize their Temenos Transact core banking workloads utilizing Red Hat OpenShift on Power10. Together, Temenos Transact running on IBM Power10 with Red Hat OpenShift lays the foundation for financial institutions to innovate with increased speed and agility, quickly meet the challenge of disruptive competition, get ahead of cybersecurity threats and even address energy usage.

To further support our clients’ modernization journey with hybrid cloud and drive increased productivity and agility, we have partnered with IBM Consulting to offer services to update, migrate and operate Temenos Transact core banking on IBM Power with Red Hat OpenShift as a SaaS-like OPEX solution on-premises for clients. 

Greater flexibility with subscription services and Power as a Service

As the skills gap continues to leave IT teams short-staffed, we are implementing modern development practices and tools to the overall IBM Power application lifecycle.

In an effort to offer businesses more flexibility, our application development and modernization tool IBM i Modernization Engine for Lifecycle Integration (Merlin) is now available as a subscription offering to help streamline ERP. When building applications on IBM i with Merlin, developers can access automated conversion of fixed-format to free-format RPG, built-in security protocols, and modern development processes and widely available industry tools such as Git and Jenkins. Merlin lays the foundation for faster provisioning, modernized applications, reduced time to market and a single DevOps pipeline. This is the first of many new flexible consumption, subscription and as a Service capabilities we plan to deliver this year.

Get started with IBM Power

I am more confident than ever in the ability of IBM Power to help our clients reach their business goals. The 2023 story I have outlined includes the ingredients necessary to accelerate their modernization efforts. These are only some of the early 2023 capabilities we will be delivering this year. I look forward to sharing many more exciting updates throughout 2023.