Innovating with ISV partners

ISVs have always played a critical role in the value IBM Power delivers to customers. Through joint development and optimization with ISVs, IBM Power has continuously led the market in performance, scalability, and flexibility. As we launch Power10 we’re excited to highlight just some of the continued innovation with ISVs, going beyond performance optimization to how we are integrating AI, extending capabilities around Linux containers and Red Hat OpenShift, and teaming to further enhance security of one of the most secure platforms in the industry.

Jointly Innovating

The launch of the IBM Power E1080 system is only the beginning. We have a number of new innovations coming to Power10 on which we are partnering with ISVs such as SAP. Changbin Song, Vice President, SAP HANA & Analytics at SAP shared “SAP and IBM are working continuously on projects and technologies to benefit their joint customers. Together, SAP and IBM plan to look at new and improved capabilities brought by Power10 for its SAP HANA workloads.” 

In Core AI Inferencing and Machine Learning

The Power10 processor is designed to democratize AI across applications and operating environments, be it on Linux, AIX, IBM i, and across the entire Power10 family of servers. IBM Power users can now infuse AI directly into the core business applications and enterprise databases and run AI close to where the data resides. Our ISV partners can leverage this via four new Matrix Math Accelerator (MMA) units in each core. MMAs are alternatives to external accelerators for the execution of statistical machine learning and inferencing and are designed to reduce cost and provide a simplified solution stack for AI. IBM has optimized math libraries to enable AI tools to benefit from the acceleration provided by MMA units. The IBM Power E1080 has 5x faster AI inferencing per socket over the IBM Power E980 and, by supporting MMAs, ISVs can use the capabilities to help customers to speed up their applications and run high performance AI with security and efficiency.

Accelerating business decisions with Red Hat

IBM and Red Hat have extended their synergy around Red Hat OpenShift and Power10 to accelerate business insights with the infusion of AI into applications and data stores with the new Power10 MMA engines. This is designed to eliminate specialized systems or attached accelerators, to lower the total cost of ownership. In addition, IBM has enabled greater efficiency in cloud-native workloads with the ability to have 4X more containerized throughput per core running Red Hat OpenShift applications than compared x86.

End-to-end cloud-native security

Securing your data is more important today than ever before with the high threat of cyber-attacks. Power10 is architected for security, leveraging accelerated encryption across the stack so that data is available only to people authorized via encryption keys. To help support our customers’ modernization effort, IBM has teamed with Aqua Security, a pure-play cloud-native security provider that builds on our strong, secured Power10 base. Amir Jerbi, Co-founder and CTO at Aqua Security, shared that “IBM customers are shifting to hybrid cloud environments to help address operating costs and increase automation, but in doing so they also demand security and compliance. Aqua plays a key role and provides a further layer of cloud native security to support this transformation. We are proud to be one of the first security providers to help IBM and their customers achieve the potential of cloud native applications.” For more details on our relationship, check out Aqua’s press release and video. Partnering with Aqua gives our customers the ability to securely deploy cloud-native Red Hat OpenShift solutions on IBM Power.

Getting Started with Power10

We understand that many of our customers may not upgrade their software and hardware concurrently. These customers can take advantage of the ability to run in Power9 compatibility mode, designed to enable them to modernize software environment at their own pace.

IBM Power has a long history of partnership and co-creation with ISVs, providing support such as complementary access for development and testing on the latest equipment and collaboration with technical professionals. Whenever we have a new server release, as with Power10, we encourage ISVs to work with their IBM contact to be nominated for early access to hardware through our Early Support Program. ISVs can learn more about the support and programs available through the ISV Resource Center.

Source: ibm.com