Highlights

• Deliver services faster, with higher quality and superior economics
• Solutions for AIX®, IBM i and PowerLinux™ operating environments
• Built on the foundation of POWER7 processor technology
• Consolidate and reduce cost with PowerVM® virtualization
• Deliver resiliency without downtime with PowerHA® and IBM Storage
• Deployment options include blades, compute nodes and servers

Smarter Computing

The planet is getting smaller, flatter and smarter every day. Global market segments are connected like never before. Economic shock waves, both good and bad, travel the globe in nanoseconds. Newer, smarter technologies arrive daily. New business models are born, and old ones die, in the blink of an eye.

This radical change is placing enormous pressure on businesses of practically every size, in just about every industry. The barriers of entry for competitors are lower. The need to be proactive, which requires an agile, flexible human and IT infrastructure, is critical. To deal with these changes, companies are embracing smarter computing.

Smarter computing entails the creation of an IT infrastructure that is designed for data and that harnesses enterprise information to unlock insights and make better, more informed choices. Organizations embracing smarter computing are creating IT infrastructures that are tuned to the tasks of the business, helping reduce costs by driving greater efficiency and performance for virtually every workload. And smarter computing is managed with cloud technologies, speeding delivery of services and creating an IT environment that has practically no boundaries, enabling the reinvention of processes and driving innovation.

Power is performance redefined

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

In this new smarter computing era for business and IT, however, forward-thinking companies consider more than server performance, existing skills and ease of management when choosing a platform for new application workloads. They also evaluate how well the platform will help them achieve three core business objectives: delivering new services faster, with higher quality and superior economics.

By implementing smarter computing projects on an IBM Power Systems platform, businesses can outpace their competitors by delivering services faster. They can differentiate their offerings from the competition by delivering higher quality services. And they can turn operational cost into investment opportunity by delivering services with superior economics.

Deliver new services faster

A key measure of performance for IT today is around agility and the ability of IT to help the business gain a competitive edge and capitalize on emerging opportunities. Businesses need to simplify and integrate their IT infrastructure to deliver new services faster.

The IBM Power Systems platform features deep integration and optimization across the full stack of hardware, firmware, hypervisor, operating systems, databases and middleware for simpler and more flexible service delivery. Optimized with PowerVM server virtualization for rapid cloud provisioning, companies can speed the delivery and deployment of new applications and processes to support their strategic business initiatives.

Deliver services with higher quality

Today’s IT departments are also measured on their ability to provide an infrastructure that can address demands for increased application service levels, while also balancing rapid change with managing business risk. Businesses need an integrated approach to managing security and compliance, resiliency and risk to deliver higher quality services.

The IBM Power Systems platform, IBM storage and IBM software provide a highly secure and resilient infrastructure foundation for smarter computing. In addition to the built-in reliability, availability and serviceability (RAS) characteristics of Power Systems servers and IBM System Storage® DS8000® and IBM Storwize® V7000 Unified storage systems, IBM PowerHA SystemMirror clustering software is also tightly integrated with the AIX and IBM i operating systems to provide a system-wide solution for business resilience.

Deliver services with superior economics

IT performance today is also measured on its ability to maintain existing services and deliver new services within tight budget constraints. In order to do more with less, businesses need to deliver services with superior economics.

Consolidation of workloads on the Power Systems platform with PowerVM server virtualization is a central feature of differentiation when comparing Power Systems versus x86 servers. PowerVM technology is designed to offer more secure and more scalable virtualization compared to VMware on x86 servers, enabling cost-effective control of server and virtual image sprawl. PowerVM technology also is designed to help Power Systems servers deliver higher server utilization rates than VMware on x86.

Watson, big data analytics and optimized 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. Optimized 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 optimized systems design in the era of smarter computing. It combines IBM DeepQA analytics software, POWER7 processor-based servers, and innovative domain knowledge and expertise from IBM Research. Watson was designed to answer Jeopardy! questions posed in natural language in less than three seconds, using POWER7 processors to execute thousands of complex analytics tasks simultaneously. Watson, however, is not a supercomputer. Watson used commercially available IBM Power® 750 servers with PowerLinux software that have also been deployed by thousands of businesses to run optimized 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 and PowerLinux software, 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. IBM is cooperating with WellPoint, America's largest health benefits company with 34 million members, to put IBM Watson technology to work and bring better service and outcomes to patients.

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