IBM Power Systems advantages

Highlights

• Deliver services faster, with higher quality and superior economics
• Design optimised systems for specific business services and workloads
• Select the optimal operating environment from AIX, IBM i and Linux
• Consolidate and reduce cost with PowerVM virtualisation
• Deliver resiliency without downtime with PowerHA and IBM Storage
• Build systems on the foundation of POWER7 processor technology
• Deploy services on blades, modular servers, and supercomputers

Performance redefined

Everyone knows what ‘performance’ meant for IT in the past. Built on the foundation of POWER7® processor technology, Power Systems™ servers and blades continue to excel and extend industry leadership in these traditional benchmarks of performance.

But the IT landscape is evolving rapidly. And, as processes become more interrelated and complex, IT is being called upon to solve challenging new problems—and implement new projects, both with higher service levels and in a more cost effective manner. IBM has the systems, software and expertise to help clients implement projects that make their IT an enabler of innovation and a catalyst for business change.

Deliver services faster, with higher quality and superior economics

Today’s IT performance means delivering services faster, with higher quality and with superior economics. The emerging measures of IT performance are around agility and the ability to help the business capitalise on new opportunities. IT is measured on providing an infrastructure that can handle rapid growth and manage business risk while meeting higher required service levels. And of course it is expected that new services will be delivered with tighter budget constraints—with IT expected to do more with less and find the lowest cost solutions possible.

Watson and optimised systems

Today, intelligence is increasingly being embedded in every operational process—from supply chain management, to human resources and payroll, to financial, security and risk management. And now, as more of the world becomes instrumented—everything from roadways, power grids, consumer goods and food—businesses need the ability to analyze the “big data” coming from these sources in real time. Optimised systems will increasingly be designed to address the unique needs of specific workloads and big data analytics, combining servers and software with critical skills and domain expertise.

Watson is emblematic of this new approach of optimised systems design in the era of smarter computing. It combines IBM DeepQA analytics software, POWER7 processor-based servers, and innovative skills from IBM Research. Watson was designed to answer Jeopardy! questions posed in natural language in less than three seconds, using massively parallel POWER7 processor performance to execute thousands of complex analytics tasks simultaneously. Watson, however, is not a supercomputer. It uses commercially available IBM Power® 750 servers that are also deployed by thousands of businesses today to run optimised systems for everything from complex analytics to transaction processing.

But Watson’s breakthrough is not in natural language processing alone. Watson represents an impressive leap forward in systems design and analytics. Its IBM DeepQA software pioneers a new kind of analytics for unstructured text and big data. Powered by IBM POWER7 processor technology, Watson is an example of the complex analytics systems that are becoming increasingly common and critical to business success and competitiveness in today’s data-intensive environment.