Driving innovation for SAP HANA workloads through IBM Power Systems Virtual Server

For enterprises and businesses running mission-critical SAP workloads, it’s time to make some important decisions. The 2027 deadline to migrate to SAP HANA and SAP S/4 HANA is looming. This date is when SAP will discontinue support for all earlier ERP applications and databases.

Meanwhile, across all industries, organizations are facing an increasing need to modernize and adapt to a hybrid cloud infrastructure, allowing enterprises to achieve new levels of speed, reliability and innovation. Strategizing and moving toward the future is a significant endeavor for a team of any size. The answer to this need? The only on-premises and off-premises certified IBM® Power® solution for SAP HANA and SAP NetWeaver — IBM Power Systems Virtual Server.

Let’s dive in to see how it all comes together to empower SAP HANA applications.

A history of driving benefits 

SAP and IBM have been working together to advance innovation for over 50 years. Our strong relationship has allowed us to collaborate on early development stages and upward, adapting each of our technologies to work together. In fact, harnessing the power of both IBM and SAP has never been easier or more effective thanks to IBM Consulting™ solutions. This offering allows businesses and organizations looking for an end-to-end solution from a managed service provider (MSP) to harness the power of SAP technology while working toward their individual goals.

We created IBM Power Systems Virtual Server as a seamless extension of on-premises Power Systems technology, where SAP HANA has been available since 2015. Yet this new hybrid cloud solution has been designed for our clients to take advantage of cloud-based efficiencies, industry-renowned security, reliable performance and the ease of having infrastructure managed by the experts at IBM. Plus, IBM Power Systems Virtual Server delivers low-latency capacities thanks to 15 data centers in 7 countries with even more on the way, augmenting high-availability (HA) and disaster recovery (DR) capacities.

When clients use the hybrid cloud solution of IBM Power Systems Virtual Server, they have access to over 50 SAP-certified production instances. Plus, they can also access customizable instances that can be specifically sized for their environment—encouraging an agile, flexible approach to today’s toughest problems.

IBM Power Systems Virtual Server is purpose-built to handle data-intensive workloads. Our SAP-certified solution follows the success achieved by IBM Power Systems for thousands of clients deploying Red Hat® Enterprise Linux® 8.1 and 8.2 as well as SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 12 and 15 Open Virtual Appliance (OVA) boot images.

Innovation with the power of Linux

For years, Red Hat and SAP have helped push innovation for clients with various needs in different stages of their transformation. Clients can get the most from their SAP workloads with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.1 and 8.2, thanks to a proven solution designed to bring flexibility and a solid foundation.

As multicloud platforms, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.1 and 8.2 are built to enable SAP clients to accelerate their hybrid cloud journeys without vendor lock-in. Features such as live kernel patching and Red Hat Enterprise Linux HA solutions for SAP HANA and SAP S/4 HANA help clients’ workloads stay running smoothly during migration.

Clients can also take full advantage of SLES 12 and 15 OVA boot images, specially optimized for IBM Power Systems Virtual Server. These solutions create even more possibilities for those clients looking to run SAP HANA workloads on SLES.

Adaptable and agile: IBM Power Systems Virtual Server in action

We’ve worked with BRF, a global leader in exporting pork and poultry headquartered in Brazil, to achieve a higher level of hybrid cloud capabilities for greater efficiency and flexibility. Harnessing the power of a hybrid cloud environment, 80% of BRF’s logistical routing, control and scheduling of products are now running on IBM Power Systems — something very much needed as the company distributes to more than 117 countries worldwide.

BRF decided to migrate to IBM Power Systems Virtual Server to become more agile and resilient. First and foremost, our HA and DR capacities helped bring stability by decentralizing the company’s operations through the multizone region within Brazil. We also helped support its migration efforts toward a virtualized environment while achieving the flexibility it needed. The company can now spin up various-sized SAP HANA instances as needed for logistics while handling the increasing demand for meat on a global scale. Moreover, while IBM Power Systems Virtual Server helped BRF reach new efficiencies, it also helped save costs.

Source: ibm.com

Continue reading

IBM Business Partners, MSPs, and ISVs amplify growth with IBM Power Systems Virtual Server

To achieve our mission of helping enterprises across the globe succeed through innovation, our team works alongside IBM® Business Partners within our valued, growing ecosystem.

Our network consists of IBM Business Partner companies, independent software vendors (ISVs), managed service providers (MSPs), global system integrators (GSIs) and other integral organizations that share our goals. Together, our Business Partners have achieved new levels of growth themselves through innovative products, including our latest IBM Power® offering, IBM Power Systems Virtual Server.

In this third installment of our blog series about IBM Power Systems Virtual Server, we’re looking at real-world examples of how growth is possible through scalable and transformative software hosting and management solutions.

IBM Power Systems Virtual Servers at a glance

Our team is thrilled about the impact our new hybrid cloud solution is already making for our Business Partners. We’ve combined the reliability and sheer processing power of on-premises Power servers with the scalability and flexibility that comes with a hybrid cloud environment. The result enables end-users to appreciate true hybrid cloud solutions that are strategically designed to be a seamless extension of their on-premises Power servers and IBM Power Systems Virtual Server data centers. IBM Power Systems Virtual Server is designed to deliver low-latency capacities thanks to 14 data centers in 7 countries with more on the way. They can run IBM AIX®, IBM i and Linux® workloads, including SAP SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 12 and 15 Open Virtualization Alliance (OVA) boot images and Red Hat® Enterprise Linux 8.1 and 8.2.

ISVs and IBM Power Systems Virtual Server

Let’s look at some examples of how ISVs are currently using IBM Power Systems Virtual Servers to promote innovation, transformation and peace of mind.

Created as a global solution

While Iptor has over 1,000 clients across the globe, its data centers were only in Denmark. Its goal was not only to globalize its operations, but also to automate and streamline its process. The worldwide data centers of IBM Power Systems Virtual Servers helped Iptor maximize uptime, while its image capture feature helped them better meet the needs of clients quickly and in a more efficient way. Finally, our DevOps pipeline helped make installation and upgrades universally accessible so customers on its supply chain could stay up to date.

A security-rich environment for sensitive data

Silverlake, a provider of a software-as-a-service (SaaS) digital banking cloud platform, joined our ecosystem to support IBM Cloud® for Financial Services™. Our collaboration allowed Silverlake to create scalable and security-rich virtual digital banking solutions in the highly regulated financial industry. Silverlake uses IBM Power Systems Virtual Server as an efficient and effective way to virtualize its solutions while meeting compliances and lowering risk.

Sandbox capabilities

Many of our ISVs that are already part of the IBM Power Systems ecosystem have found success by conducting proof of concepts (PoCs) in IBM Power Systems Virtual Server data centers. These vendors have containerized their applications, while also running demo versions of their application in a client-accessible sandbox. With this structure in place, prospects can try out applications in an isolated environment. This offering is designed to help improve security and uptime while helping environments meet spikes in traffic.

MSPs, Business Partners and IBM Power Systems Virtual Server

It’s always vital for MSPs, resellers and business partners to grow and discover new opportunities and revenue paths. IBM Power Systems Virtual Server is an excellent way to extend Power Systems offerings in a hybrid cloud environment for current and new customers while being supported and covered by the IBM brand. Moreover, we take infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) management responsibilities from our MSPs and take care of it ourselves, including maintenance, data center floor space, updates and the costs of running a data center. Handling the maintenance of infrastructure helps not only cut costs by taking away data center expenses, but it also helps increase revenue margins and maximize uptime and availability.

As an IBM partner, you now have the opportunity to build partner-driven solutions on top of IBM Power Systems Virtual Server. We work alongside MSPs looking to grow in the enterprise space and shift their focus on services, such as disaster recovery (DR), migration, end-to-end management or reselling the offering. IBM Power Systems Virtual Server helps the clients of our Business Partners reach new geographies — regardless of their location — to further achieve globalization. Clients also have quicker access to new Power Systems features and functions.

At the end of the day, it’s all about making a better experience for the end-user. Plus, being the only on-premises and off-premises certified Power solution for SAP HANA and SAP NetWeaver platform workloads, IBM can help enterprises meet the deadline to migrate to SAP S/4 HANA by 2027.

◉ Success through collaboration

A leader in hosting and managed services, Connectria has years of demonstrated and recognized experience serving IBM i customers. Connectria is now offering IBM Power Systems Virtual Server solutions to both its install base and new prospects after seeing strong demand for such a virtualized Power solution.

The Connectria team was excited to work with us, embracing opportunities to access a new market of high-end P30-tier licensing clients, as well as several other IBM i software tiers. We provided a variety of managed services and licensing specifically tailored to Connectria’s goals, growth objectives and current offerings. Now, Connectria is proud to offer our hybrid cloud infrastructure portfolio solutions bundled together alongside its management solutions. Connectria is also extending and shifting current clients’ infrastructure, including older on-premises Power Systems, to IBM Power Systems Virtual Server. As a result, Connectria clients can stay modernized by staying virtual.

Driven by the benefits of this latest offering combined with competitive pricing, Connectria’s sales team is proposing Power System Virtual Server solutions worldwide. Clients can now experience a new level of performance, experience and peace of mind.

A look at our roadmap

We are always pushing to add new capacities and capabilities to IBM Power Systems Virtual Server. In addition to upgrading our storage to IBM FlashSystem® 9200, here’s a high-level look at what end-users are finding beneficial. We’ve recently implemented virtual private network as a service (VPNaaS) solutions into this offering, as well as new network automation features. Coming soon is a whole new way to manage your IBM Power Systems Virtual Server, with IBM Cloud credit management. This credit system creates a simplified and efficient way for you to get the most out of your virtualized solution.

Source: ibm.com

Continue reading

Develop your skillset: hands-on training for IBM PowerVC 2.0 and Red Hat Ansible

IBM PowerVC 2.0 hit the market in fourth quarter of 2020. Since then, IBM has produced incremental updates to the software. The IBM PowerVC product development team worked hard to bring modern design and open-source JavaScript frameworks to cloud management on IBM Power. After having tried it for several months, I can’t recommend it more. If you’re using IBM Power servers, you should be running IBM PowerVC to manage them.

I’ve spoken with several new IBM Power administrators who are looking to test drive the product without having to worry about obtaining and managing licenses. There’s a button on the official product page that lets you download a trial version of the software, which you can then use to install in your own environment. But what if you wanted more? For example, everything from understanding the basics of IBM Power virtualization to the latest advanced VM management capabilities of IBM Power.

PowerVC 2.0 Workshop

IBM and our Global Training Partners now have an official IBM PowerVC 2.0 workshop! This gives you several days of access to systems in our IBM data center. You can touch and feel the product from the comfort of your home or office – everything from installation to advanced private cloud management. You can also get an official IBM-approved instructor to deliver the content to your organization.

That’s easily said. But, behind the scenes, IBM has dedicated pools of IBM Power servers in an IBM managed data center. They had to be specifically configured to automate everything from giving you access to a virtual machine that connects you to our network, to setting up a bunch of virtual partitions, virtual Hardware Management Consoles (HMC) and IBM PowerVC NovaLink related configurations. All that happens automatically when you book our workshop.

The PowerVC 2.0 workshop shows you how to set up IBM PowerVC 2.0.1 in both HMC and IBM PowerVM Novalink managed environments. It covers every single major administrative task. That includes a lot of information on OpenStack. We’ll manage Red Hat Enterprise Linux and IBM AIX partitions. Automation with Cloud-init and the implications of running your own Infrastructure as a Service cloud are discussed in detail.

Virtual TechU

At the virtual IBM TechU 2021, I will present on something similar. I have sessions on IBM PowerVC and Red Hat Ansible. The idea is to leverage the systems and automation software we’ve created in our data center to showcase our latest capabilities. I have a hands-on session on how to get started with IBM PowerVC to manage your operating systems and perform virtual machine lifecycle tasks. My second hands-on session is on how to get started with Ansible on Linux and run Playbooks to perform configuration management on IBM Power. I will showcase how to implement Ansible on AIX in a third hands-on session. I will also present a demo, on running Ansible on a Linux partition on IBM Power. These Red Hat Ansible sessions are now part of an official IBM training course too, which you can enroll in here. I will also present a general interest hands-on session on using Git and GitHub efficiently to perform source code management tasks.

I’m excited about the new training opportunities that will help you, our clients, to better utilize the IBM solutions critical to running your business. I hope to see you at TechU or a workshop soon.

Source: ibm.com

Continue reading

IBM Power Systems Virtual Server: designed to drive performance, security and automation

The more innovative and modernized enterprises become, the more critical the need is for security that doesn’t compromise performance. In the past year, the market has seen large-scale ransomware attacks make reputable businesses suffer from operational shutdowns, compromised data and even lawsuits — all costing millions of dollars. Worse than taking months to recover financially, these attacks can have lasting impacts on customer perception.

Read More: C2010-825: IBM Rational Team Concert V6

End-to-end security continues to be a key aspect of IBM® Power® servers as well as our latest virtualized offering, IBM Power Systems Virtual Server. In this second installment of our blog series about IBM Power Systems Virtual Server, we’re looking at how large and small businesses that are new to Power solutions can benefit from this robust offering.

Multilayered security and uptime

It’s essential to approach your enterprise’s security with a proactive mindset. For many generations, IBM Power Systems has delivered renowned end-to-end security for on-premises environments, an approach that protects each layer of your IT hardware and software stack from both internal and external threats.

IBM Power Systems Virtual Server technology is a continuation of our commitment to deliver the security that today’s enterprises need in an ever-demanding online environment. We combined the security and isolation of an on-premises system with a virtualized environment’s reliability and innovation.

IBM Power System Virtual Server is powered by Power S Class and E Class enterprise systems that run IBM PowerVM® server virtualization which gives users the reliability and resilience that they require. We’ve designed this solution to help enterprises remain operational even during storms and disasters thanks to 14 global data centers across 7 countries, with even more locations coming. By incorporating both reliability and resilience into PowerVM® technology, high availability (HA) and disaster recovery (DR) are on a different level of performance for these virtualized machines. This is most clearly illustrated by the findings in the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). If you search its database for vulnerabilities found in the PowerVM server virtualization feature or PowerVM hypervisor, you’ll get zero results. This is the peace of mind we would like to offer to all our clients.

Develop cloud native applications with Red Hat OpenShift

Containerized workloads are changing the way we develop, deploy and manage applications for enterprises. When you combine this innovation with the power of open-source technology like Red Hat OpenShift, you have a solution designed to deliver game-changing results. We’re excited that our clients can provision Red Hat OpenShift clusters on IBM Power Systems Virtual Server, offering robust capabilities for application modernization and cloud native development. Utilizing a combination of tools and helper scripts, we have simplified the User Provisioned Install process to help you get a Red Hat OpenShift cluster up and running on IBM Power Systems Virtual Server in as little as a few hours. Red Hat OpenShift on Power supports a rich ecosystem of applications and middleware, including over 15,000 open-source software packages, Red Hat Application Services, IBM Cloud Pak® and ISV applications.

The obvious choice for SAP workloads

For enterprises with SAP workloads, the clock is ticking. Users must migrate to the SAP S/4 HANA system by 2027. When you consider this deadline alongside the ever-growing need to implement a hybrid strategy, it’s essential to go with IBM Power Systems Virtual Server — the only on-premises and off-premises certified Power solution for SAP HANA and SAP NetWeaver platform workloads, providing a truly hybrid cloud experience end to end.

Additionally, uptime for SAP workloads is a critical consideration. According to the ITIC 2020 survey, 88% of enterprises indicate that unplanned downtime costs USD 300,000 per hour — or USD 4,998 per minute, per server. Now, users are modernizing their SAP applications, provisioning workloads and maximizing uptime with the help of IBM Power Systems Virtual Server.

Smaller HANA t-shirt sizes will be made available on IBM Power Systems Virtual Server later this year, which means there will be over 50 SAP-certified HANA instances. These smaller instances range from 128GB in memory to 768GB with 4 cores. Power is developed to provide the flexibility to address the needs of our customers.

IBM Cloud connection

We are excited to provide an automated way to connect IBM Power Systems Virtual Server instances to IBM Cloud® resources that include classic and VPC networks. Cloud connections create a Direct Link Connect (2.0) instance to connect your IBM Power Systems Virtual Server instances to IBM Cloud resources. The IBM Power Systems Virtual Server 10Gb/s Direct Link Connect 2.0 is designed to enable access to IBM Cloud resources with much higher performance and in a streamlined, user-friendly way.

Multitenant environments

Achieve high levels of performance without wasting resources. Enterprises can run IBM AIX® and IBM i workloads. On the Linux® side of workloads, our clients have the freedom to provision both SAP SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 12 and 15 OVA boot images and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 8.1 and 8.2 capabilities. These workloads can run with as little as a quarter of a core, allowing the ability to scale and to run workloads on-premises and off-premises — lowering cost while increasing application modernization.

Versatile payment options

Pay-as-you-go and savings plan subscription options enable you to pay however best fits your enterprise’s needs. For the pay-as-you-go option, enterprises have the flexibility to use data center capacities and resources as needed. Meanwhile, savings plans offer up to a 30% discount for 1-year commitments and up to 45% discounts for 3-year commitments.

Low infrastructure maintenance

Your focus should be on your mission-critical workloads. That’s why IBM takes the task of infrastructure management and maintenance off our clients’ hands. We can also help you achieve modernization and expansion to hybrid cloud with IBM Systems Lab Services and IBM Garage™.

Developing and testing

We know that the availability of non-production configuration is essential for enterprises as they strive toward innovation. The scalability of IBM Power Systems Virtual Server allows our clients to run multiple sandbox environments simultaneously without larger capital budgets. They can also spin logical partitions (LPARs) up and down as needed, and use bursting capabilities during needed periods.

A look at our roadmap

If you’re new to Power servers, there hasn’t been a more robust offering that will drive change for your business — nor a better time to get started. Here are some things that our clients will experience soon.

◉ Updates focused on ISO27k standards for privacy

◉ SOC 2 amenability

◉ Payment Card Industry (PCI) amenability

◉ Virtual private network as a service (VPNaaS)

◉ IBM Cloud credit management

◉ Network automation features

◉ Backup and restore services

IBM Power Systems Virtual Server in action

A client of ours is one of the largest logistics operators in Spain, Portugal and beyond that delivers goods for clients in verticals, including automotive, pharmaceutical, healthcare and electronics. When the COVID-19 pandemic caused a spike in demand on the online shopping front, the client needed an environment that allowed for the drastic scalability it was experiencing without putting more stress on its IT team, which was already struggling with bandwidth. With IBM Power Systems Virtual Server, the client achieved this scalability and easily managed the spike in traffic. The best part — our client can now focus on providing great results for its customers across the globe while we manage its infrastructure.

Source: ibm.com

Continue reading

IBM Power Ecosystem reacts to Power10 launch

As we continue our focus on the critical role IBM Power ISVs play in supporting the Power 10 launch, I would like to highlight innovations with ISVs that go beyond performance optimization to how we are extending capabilities around AIX solutions with OpenShift on Red Hat, enabling IBM Power as a platform for mission critical data management solutions, and driving continued competitive advantages with ISVs for our AIX and IBM i clients.

Application modernization

Any application modernization effort requires a strong ecosystem of software to provide developers the ability to leverage new innovations and position their business to realize efficiency and flexibility gains.

Read More: C1000-004: IBM Cúram SPM V7.X Application Developer

Finacle customers have long relied on IBM Power to run their mission-critical core banking workloads. As banks face pressure from demanding customers and competition from fintechs, they are innovating to handle an increased demand for digital banking and more personalized services. Finacle Digital Engagement Hub provides customers who have long relied on Finacle Core Banking on AIX with a system of engagement with analytics-driven customer experiences across channels, applications, and devices. The Digital Engagement Hub is a cloud-native workload deployed with Red Hat OpenShift and can be delivered on the same infrastructure as the core banking workload, allowing for a highly flexible solution offering with very low latency.

Kelly Switt, senior director of Financial Services Industry Strategy, Ecosystem and Strategic Partnerships at Red Hat explained that, “We predict the future of digital banking will be built on the ability of FSIs to innovate at scale while retaining stable and reliable operations. Red Hat OpenShift running on Power10 can provide a production-ready, cloud-native foundation that fosters innovative offerings like Finacle Digital Engagement Hub, supporting banks and financial institutions in driving the next-generation of personalized services without impacting operational stability.”

Power10 based systems provide a solid foundation for application modernization. The consolidation and dynamic scaling capabilities enable customers to run systems of record side by side with Red Hat OpenShift based applications, allowing for a highly agile and flexible experience. Power10 is designed to allow customers to incrementally modernize by extending the value of existing applications on AIX, IBM i and Linux while starting to surround them with new cloud-native apps at their own rate and pace. Customers are able to leverage existing investments while also reaping the innovation, technology and economic benefits of the Power platform as the technology stack is modernized.

Mission-critical data management

Customers have utilized IBM Power for over 25 years with mission critical databases. The introduction of Power10 builds on the industry leading reliability of IBM Power, ranked most reliable for 12 years by ITIC, with the delivery of innovations like Open Memory Interface and inter-node SMP fabric.

Reliability is incredibly important as customers begin evaluating the modernization of existing systems of record to open source databases (OSDBs) like PostgreSQL and MongoDB. On database modernization, Eric Cargol, VP NA Commercial Sales and Global IBM Alliance at EnterpriseDB expressed how “Customers are increasingly using PostgreSQL as their database of choice to accelerate innovation and meet business objectives. EDB’s enterprise-grade PostgreSQL, coupled with IBM Power’s top ranked reliability and investment in hybrid cloud, makes Power10 a great option for flexible and scalable growth of EDB environments. We are aligned with IBM and committed to supporting our joint customers across their modernization journey.”

Leveraging enterprise distributions of popular OSDBs like PostgreSQL and MongoDB provide the support and tools needed for deploying mission-critical databases, whether they are new applications, re-platforming, or legacy database migrations. Undertaking the shift to commercial OSDBs with IBM Power and our ISVs minimizes the risks customers face with an extremely reliable system that maximizes availability and performance while minimizes outages.

IBM i ISVs excited for Power10

The IBM i operating system team has an incredibly strong customer base and ISV ecosystem. Current innovations focus on numerous areas, including application modernization, along with ongoing enhancements in Db2, RPG, and open source integration. The latest IBM i is designed to benefit from Power10 performance and throughput gains for single-threaded and multi-threaded workloads. Future work with Power10 and IBM i includes the exploration of on-chip compression and crypto accelerators. Ross Freeman, Product Manager and IBM Strategy Leader for IBM i partner, Infor, shared his excitement around Power10, “As a long-standing ISV of IBM Power, Infor is excited by the industry-leading innovation in the new Power10 systems. With thousands of clients running on IBM Power today we look forward to continuing our relationship with IBM and the benefits Power10 will bring to our mutual clients.”

AIX leveraging Power10 technology

The IBM Power team ensures that each operating system, AIX, IBM i, and Linux all take advantage of new Power10 functionalities. The AIX operating system team has a history of collaborating with ISVs for roadmap enhancements that help them optimize and build value around their solutions. This collaboration is demonstrated in the recently published IBM Power10 whitepaper. Other examples include enabling open source technology, performance and scale features, services for integrating with Power capabilities such as hardware acceleration of encryption and compression, and support for IBM’s next generation of advanced compilers with features for Power10 optimization and acceleration of machine learning and inferencing solutions.

Source: ibm.com

Continue reading

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

Continue reading

Announcing IBM Power E1080: engineered for agility

Organizations around the world are navigating constant and rapid changes to their operations and customer demand. They want IT infrastructure to help them be agile and flexible, efficient, and cyber resilient. It should help them to predict marketplace changes and respond at near real-time. While this requires their data to transform into value quickly, the security of sensitive data remains a key concern with increased ransomware and malware attacks. As organizations modernize their infrastructure, IBM is addressing these requirements with the new IBM Power E1080, the first in a generation of servers based on the Power10 processor.

IBM Power E1080 is engineered for agility. It supports IT modernization with a frictionless hybrid cloud experience. Here is how it is designed to deliver on the key enterprise needs:

Respond faster to business demands

Power E1080 delivers scalability and efficiency.

◉ World record SAP SD-two tier benchmark with 8 sockets that beats the best 16 socket results of x86 environment

◉ 2.5X performance per core than x86 Xeon Platinum

What if you can get this performance with a lower energy footprint? With the revolutionary 7nm Power10 processor, workloads that run on a Power E980 will consume 33% lower energy when run on the Power E1080.

IBM Power10 generation of servers is designed to make technology consumption a frictionless experience. With Hybrid Cloud Credits, enterprises can procure pay-per-use capacity that can be deployed across Power Private Cloud and Power Virtual Server co-located with IBM Cloud. The architectural consistency across these environments gives the flexibility to deploy where you want and when you want without requiring additional middleware or application re-factoring.

Protect data from core to cloud

With data residing in an increasingly distributed environment, you cannot set a perimeter to it anymore. This reinforces the need for layered security across IT stack. Power10 family of servers introduces a new layer of defense with transparent memory encryption. All data in memory remains encrypted when in transit between memory and processor. Since this capability is enabled at the silicon level, there is no additional management setup and performance impact. Power10 also includes 4X more crypto engines in every core compared to Power9 to accelerate encryption performance across the stack. For example, the widely used AES encryption performance is improved by 2.5X over Power E980.

With these innovations along with new in-core defense for Return-Oriented Programming attacks and support for Post Quantum Encryption and Fully Homomorphic Encryption, IBM Power E1080 makes the server platform family that is among the most secure even better.

Streamline insights and automation

As more AI models are deployed in production, the challenges around the AI infrastructure are coming to the fore. The typical AI deployment involves sending data from an operational platform to a GPU system. This usually induces latency and may even increase security risks with more data in network. Power10 addresses this challenge with in-core AI inferencing and machine learning. The Matrix Math Accelerator (MMA) in Power10 core provides the computational strength (at multiple levels of precision) and data bandwidth to tackle demanding AI inferencing and machine learning. Power E1080 delivers 5X faster AI inferencing per socket over Power E980.

Maximize reliability and availability

Power has been leading the industry in infrastructure reliability with 25% lower downtime vs. comparable high-end server. With Power E1080 we are making the most reliable server platform in its class even better with advanced recovery, diagnostic capabilities, and Open Memory Interface (OMI) attached advance memory DIMMs. The continuous operations of today’s in-memory systems depend on memory reliability because of their large memory footprint. Power10 DIMMs deliver 2X better memory reliability and availability than industry standard DIMMs.

As enterprises continue to modernize their business, the solutions of our ISV ecosystem partners will take advantage of these innovative and essential capabilities in IBM Power E1080. They will continue to help customers get more from their mission-critical workloads running on Power.

This is a critical time for IT infrastructure. Companies need agility, security, insights and reliability to ensure continuous operations. IBM Power is engineered for times like these.

Source: ibm.com

Continue reading

IBM Power Systems announces new hybrid cloud capabilities

Envision your data center a year from today. What has changed? Have you gained efficiency? Lowered costs? Increased agility and flexibility? These are just a few of the goals IBM Power Systems™ clients are focused on as they seek to integrate and extend their most mission-critical applications into hybrid cloud environments. The journey to hybrid cloud requires a variety of tools — not a one-size-fits-all approach — to successfully transform your operations.

Read More: C2150-606: IBM Security Guardium V10.0 Administration

Today we are announcing new capabilities available on the IBM Power Systems platform to help meet your business needs, no matter what point you are at in transforming your data center for the hybrid cloud era. You will have more options to leverage industry-leading scalability, reliability for VM based containerized applications and security built in at all layers from the processor to the OS. Clients can modernize their AIX®, IBM i and Linux® applications by deploying them in a hybrid cloud environment, automating common IT operations with Ansible, and co-locating containerized workloads with VM-based applications.

Unified enterprise hybrid cloud experience 

IBM Power Systems enables clients to move their mission-critical applications across hybrid cloud without refactoring or re-platforming. Now, we are adding more capabilities to provide a unified experience to acquire capacity in all Power®environments.

◉ IBM is extending that ability to hybrid cloud by piloting hybrid capacity credits, which can be purchased and used to unlock capacity on on-premises servers as well as on IBM Power Virtual Servers. IBM is also working with other ecosystem partners to further extend dynamic capacity across multiple Linux distributions.

◉ IBM is helping you to drive agility with new Ansible modules from Red Hat® Ansible® Certified Content for IBM Power Systems across your hybrid cloud deployments on AIX, IBM i and Linux environments. IBM Power Systems has added 22 new Ansible modules to the collection that bring new automation capabilities for common tasks like patch management, security management, OS & application deployment, continuous delivery, centralized backup and recovery, and virtualization management & provisioning, bringing the total number of POWER-supported Ansible modules to 102. Currently, there are 102 Ansible modules, downloaded more than 13,000 times since February 2021, that support POWER and are available to the open-source community on GitHub. Many of these same modules are available as production-ready, enterprise-hardened and certified Ansible Collections through the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform.”

Modernize existing applications

Now you are well into mapping out your hybrid cloud data center and looking to the future with new workloads. IBM Power Systems remains committed to supporting the modernization of your existing applications and building new cloud-native workloads required for transformation and business growth. With a robust 10+ year roadmap for AIX and IBM i, we are committed to delivering capabilities and solutions to help you meet today’s needs and prepare for future challenges.

◉ AIX 7.3 is coming to your data center in 2021. It will continue a 35-year tradition of innovation with enhanced capabilities that deliver resiliency, security and scale needed to get your IT environment ready for hybrid cloud.

◉ For clients who cannot upgrade currently or need more time to upgrade to IBM i 7.3, we are now supporting IBM i 7.1 on Power Systems Virtual Server co-located with IBM Cloud®.

Build new application services

IBM Power Systems continues to deliver modern capabilities to simplify the build of new cloud-native applications with OpenShift, which can be co-located with your existing AIX and IBM i applications.

◉ Simplify and accelerate private cloud deployments with the new IBM Power Systems Private Cloud Rack Solution. This is a pre-configured system with compute, storage, networking and pre-installed software to match an organization’s existing infrastructure, whether it is based around Linux, IBM i or AIX. It can help organizations operationalize their cloud management and provide an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) environment to help clients accelerate development and operations for Kubernetes container-based cloud-native applications with Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform.

◉ Expand into public cloud with Red Hat OpenShift® on Power Virtual Server leveraging OpenShift’s platform-agnostic installer. IBM Power Virtual Server is an enterprise IaaS offering built around IBM POWER9™, offering low-latency access to over 200 IBM Cloud services. In addition, IBM Power Virtual Server clients can now run leading business applications like SAP HANA in an IBM POWER9-based cloud.

◉ Red Hat Runtimes are now available on Power Systems, delivering a consistent development experience for applications that span across Power and other platforms.

Imagine your data center in 2022 and beyond. With our approach to continue delivering new capabilities, IBM Power Systems gives you the right infrastructure platform and co-optimized solutions to power your hybrid enterprise now and into the future!

Source: ibm.com

Continue reading

8 reasons why IBM Power Systems is your app modernization foundation

Application modernization comes in many shapes and sizes, and it’s not always easy to know where to start. So, over the next few minutes, we’ll showcase the strengths and benefits that IBM Power Systems™ brings to your modernization efforts. Sure, there are many more benefits than we’ll cover here. For more in-depth analysis tips and recommendations to help you determine the complexity of your applications and a modernization path forward, you can check out our Field Guide to Application Modernization on IBM Power Systems.

Read More: C2150-606: IBM Security Guardium V10.0 Administration

Power Systems is built for core enterprise applications and for the next wave of digital transformation fueled by application modernization. Here are the major benefits of modernizing with IBM Power Systems:

1: Flexible, efficient utilization

You can manage spikes in demand and support more cloud workloads per server with IBM PowerVM® hypervisor on-demand CPU capacity. It manages demand by sharing pools of CPU cores across Red Hat® OpenShift® CoreOS nodes. These differentiating hypervisor constructs such as uncapped processors and shared processor pools provide the ability to guarantee performance SLAs while donating unused processor cycles to worker nodes in need of additional capacity. All this flexibility guarantees an 80 percent utilization on an IBM Power Systems E980 server.

2: More performance from software with fewer servers

You can buy fewer Power Systems servers to run an equivalent set of applications at comparable throughput levels than on competing platforms. That’s because it enables you to use 3.2X more containers per core with more CPU threads, achieve 2.6X better price performance (based on the number of containers), and collocate cloud-native apps with AIX, IBM i and Linux® virtual machine-based apps and enterprise data to exploit low-latency API connections to business-critical data. Plus, you can leverage sub-capacity licensing to greatly reduce containerized software license costs (IBM Cloud Pak Solutions, for example) using PowerVM shared processor pools, allowing CPU cores to be autonomously shared across Red Hat OpenShift worker nodes without sacrificing app performance.

3: Superior performance for your enterprise data

Running Red Hat OpenShift in a virtual machine adjacent to your AIX, IBM i or Linux virtual machines provides low-latency secure communication to your enterprise data with PowerVM Virtual I/O Server. This provides superior performance due to fewer network hops. It also allows for highly secure communication between your new cloud-native apps and your enterprise data stores as network traffic never has to leave the physical server.

4: Proven security and resiliency

To meet today’s security challenges, it’s essential that every layer of your company’s IT hardware and software stack remains secured. IBM Power Systems customers utilize the most reliable mainstream server platform to innovate and get to market faster without compromising security. Power Systems’ multi-layered approach to security gives you full visibility of your hardware and software. It protects the stack with comprehensive end-to-end security at every layer — including functionality that allows containers to remain secure, during and after deployment — all with a simple web-based UI.

5: Trusted and proven foundation

Kubernetes provides the core foundation for modernizing your enterprise applications. As the premier open-source container orchestration platform, it benefits both developers and IT administrators. Your developers have access to the latest software innovations to build software faster while your IT administrators can easily observe, operate and manage the platform and infrastructure. This helps you deliver high-value, high-quality software faster to end users. All of this is enabled through Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform.

6: Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform

Red Hat OpenShift is an enterprise-ready Kubernetes container platform with full-stack automated operations to manage hybrid multicloud deployments. Red Hat OpenShift is optimized to improve developer productivity and promote innovation; it is fully supported on all IBM Power Systems servers (IBM POWER8® processors or later).

7: IBM Cloud Pak solutions

Power Systems provides superior performance and economics for containerized workloads like IBM Cloud Pak enterprise-ready containerized software solutions for modernizing existing applications and developing new cloud-native apps that run on Red Hat OpenShift.

There are three main benefits: They are comprehensive and easy to use, they are supported by Red Hat and IBM, and they run anywhere Red Hat OpenShift runs. IBM Cloud Pak Solutions take a bundled approach that allows you to accelerate your modernization journey by packaging everything you need to get started — including Red Hat OpenShift and the apps that run on top of it. The IBM Cloud Pak solutions available on IBM Power Systems include IBM Cloud Pak for Applications, IBM Cloud Pak for Data and IBM Cloud Pak for Multicloud Management.

8: Innovate with an extensive container software ecosystem

At the heart of any application modernization effort is a strong software ecosystem that allows teams to innovate using the latest technologies. Now more than ever, open-source communities are playing a significant role in organizations’ modernization journeys. IBM Power Systems not only runs your core business applications, but also a wide range of popular open-source and commercial container software.

When you choose Power Systems to modernize, you choose industry-leading reliability, performance and security, as well as superior compute performance for data-intense and mission-critical applications. It is a foundation for modern container-based applications.

Source: ibm.com

Continue reading

BrainCreators transforms asset monitoring with digital intelligence

Look around you. You’re probably surrounded by some kind of infrastructure, whether it’s the walls of your home or your office, the rails under the train you’re commuting on, or the sidewalk beneath your feet–by the way, please look where you’re going.

All this infrastructure has to be managed by someone. You already know how much work it takes to keep a house or apartment in good condition. Imagine how complicated it gets when you ramp that effort up to enterprise scale. Companies that work in asset-intensive industries–utilities, railways, construction companies and manufacturers for example–should inspect their infrastructure continuously to monitor the condition of their assets and conduct repairs or replacements when necessary.

These organizations devote huge amounts of resources to managing physical assets. Many have teams with acres of domain expertise built up over years of practice. At the same time, as artificial intelligence (AI) becomes more commonplace, these companies want to explore how they can use new techniques to make asset management more efficient.

At BrainCreators we bridge the gap between planning and reality allowing domain experts to apply intelligent automation for asset inspection. And we use IBM Power Systems to do it; let us tell you how.

Choosing the right starting point

BrainMatter uses the latest developments in AI to apply end-to-end intelligent automation for effective physical asset monitoring and control. Many businesses are exploring AI by experimenting with data science tooling. As a result, lots of AI models are developed that never make it to production. BrainMatter goes beyond AI experiments to provide a platform for intelligent automation of tasks that follow a perceive-decide-respond pattern.

We combine rapid recognition, direct assessment and immediate action to enable an intuitive and transparent workflow. A BrainMatter user can automate thousands of tasks without ever needing to consult a data scientist.

Behind the scenes

To build BrainMatter, we scoured the market for the best accelerated servers and tested them. IBM Power Systems was the clear leader, combining NVIDIA NVLink with IBM CPU technology to outperform competitors. Using the same technology that powers two of the world’s fastest supercomputers, Sierra and Summit, we knew that Power Systems was the right platform to make short work of highly data-intensive use cases.

In designing our architecture, we replicated the IBM-recommended approach, opting for a containerized design built on Linux and orchestrated by Kubernetes.

With BrainMatter up and running, we can now construct AI models for asset inspection, monitoring and control, quickly and easily. With the powerful IBM server platform, we can rapidly train the models with millions of images, enabling them to identify patterns and make accurate predictions about asset condition.

BrainMatter in action

Our platform is exceptionally good at turning domain expertise and skills into intelligent automation to make life easier for your employees and optimize your processes. It’s designed to perceive through rapid  recognition, decide by instant reality check against norm or plan, and respond with immediate action.

For example, we just announced a partnership with Unihorn to intelligently automate their road inspection solution. Until now, they have relied on cars equipped with cameras to drive thousands of kilometers of road. A team of road inspectors analyzes the footage over the course of five weeks, classifying defects that deviate from the norm, raising tickets and determining the next best action. With BrainMatter, they’ll shrink the road inspection process from five weeks to seconds, happening as their cars drive around. In addition, they can augment road maintenance work orders in IBM Maximo with better insights and immediate action enabled by BrainMatter.

We also recently won the Schiphol Pointcloud Innovation Challenge, which challenged participants to harness data from 3D/Pointcloud scanners to deliver new or improved products and services to people working at Schiphol Airport.

In just seven days, we developed a solution that monitors maintenance-related assets in Schiphol Terminal 1 nonstop. Members of our team taught BrainMatter to recognize approximately 25,000 assets in nearly 2,000 high-resolution panoramic images with an effort of only a few hours each day.

The judges scored us the maximum number of points for showcasing immediate value for Schiphol and its main contractors, high feasibility and applicability, scalable and intuitive UI, along with a strong commercial approach. The solution will replace manual inspections with automated alerts through tickets when assets such as lighting, smoke detectors and surveillance cameras require maintenance. Consequently, Schiphol and its main contractors can improve their first-time fix rate, enhance their ability to exchange information, reduce costs and better identify risks.

These are just two instances where we’ve delivered tangible value with help from IBM Power Systems. From manufacturing to real estate, airports to logistics, at BrainCreators we know that even when offloading tasks to machines–it is ultimately all about people. It is about curiosity and linking that to experience. About opening the windows to the world of AI and machine learning. All of us live and learn . . . so let’s harness the power of our collective brains.

Source: ibm.com

Continue reading

What is edge computing and how can it help my business?

How we compute has substantially shifted over the years. One innovative method enables real-time action, improves user experience and reduces costs by putting compute power closer to the source of data. It’s called edge computing, and we’re only at the beginning of what it can do.

Edge computing is a distributed computing paradigm that moves compute and AI to the edge, where data is generated and action is taken. This allows faster insights and actions, better data security and control and more continuous operation.

IBM has designed infrastructure that is optimized for edge computing, including servers purpose-built for AI workloads that are both on the edge and near the edge. Paired with storage solutions that provide industry-leading performance and essentially unlimited scalability, businesses will have an edge platform that will enable them to do the most with their data.

Edge computing for manufacturing: A case study

IBM recently built an end-to-end edge solution for manufacturing. IBM Visual Insights is running on the IBM Power System AC922 for model training, IBM Cloud or on-premises applications for centralized control, IBM Edge Application Manager for deploying and managing the models, and NVIDIA Jetson TX2 for inferencing. IBM Cloud Object Store and IBM Elastic Storage System 3000 are used to provide a unified storage for data and models. For heavier workloads, the IBM Power System IC922 is ideal for inferencing compared to Jetson TX2.

With this solution, IBM was able to:

◉ reduce inspection time from 10 minutes to less than one minute per product
◉ reduce field issues
◉ improve customer satisfaction
◉ ensure large-scale model and edge device life-cycle management

Many businesses are already seeing the benefits of edge computing. Success stories include improving streaming video and producing high-resolution images from an assembly line. Such data has to be processed in real time, with machine learning at the edge or near edge.

How can edge computing benefit your industry?

IBM has taken the lead in edge computing, bringing high-performance computing and AI solutions to many different industries. IBM is particularly specialized in cases where a significant amount of workload is run in micro data centers or edge networks such as at airports, factories and large retail stores.

Many businesses are seeing the impact edge computing can have. It can improve production monitoring for manufacturing,  drive predictive maintenance and asset management for oil and gas, and even power autonomous vehicles. Cities looking to take advantage of technology to better serve its citizens can improve traffic control measures.

Edge computing can bring measurable benefits to business from the get-go and more opportunities will continue to emerge.  With 5G rolling out in many countries in 2020, edge computing will get an additional boost from 5G’s unmatched bandwidth, high speed and low latency; it will transmit a large amount of data at a high speed to and from hybrid multicloud and edge locations. The possibilities through edge computing and IBM will only continue to grow.

Click here to learn more about edge and IT infrastructure, or see what’s possible with edge computing in your industry.

Source: ibm.com

Continue reading

AI at the edge: Driving new business opportunities at the point of data creation

Data has always come from outside the data center. As the number of smart devices generating new data grows, there is a need for faster processing and an increased pressure on networks to process data efficiently. The processing must necessarily leave the data center and move closer to the edge, where the data are created. By 2022, 50 percent of enterprise data will be processed at the edge, compared to only 10 percent today.

Edge computing enables faster insights and actions as running inference closer to the data source improves speed to action. In AI inferencing, where sub-second latency is the expectation, the latency accumulated by sending data back to a central processing facility becomes the bottleneck in business operations.

With dedicated infrastructure, better data security and control are possible, as minimizing data transport to central hubs reduces both vulnerabilities and the aforementioned latency. Finally, putting processing at the edge enables continuous operations to reduce disruption and cost, running autonomously even when disconnected.

When the creators of the Mayflower Autonomous Ship faced these exact challenges, they reached out to IBM to deliver a solution that would meet their difficult requirements. The team at ProMare was looking to create a fully autonomous version of the Mayflower ship to recreate the historic Atlantic Ocean crossing in 1620 from Plymouth, England, to America. Sailing across the Atlantic Ocean represents the ultimate edge application, thousands of miles from any human contact or data center.

The team decided to put IBM at the helm, building an AI captain using IBM Power Systems AC922 and IBM Visual Insights. Without human intervention, the ship will navigate the Atlantic after having been trained using a literal ocean of images to recognize and maneuver past anything it encounters on the way.

“Many of today’s autonomous ships are really just automated robots [that] do not dynamically adapt to new situations and rely heavily on operator override,” says Don Scott, CTO of the Mayflower Autonomous Ship. “Using an integrated suite of IBM’s AI, cloud, and edge technologies, we are aiming to give the Mayflower full autonomy and are pushing the boundaries of what’s currently possible.”

We also recently announced IBM Power Systems IC922, built specifically for inference workloads at the edge. Power Systems IC922 provides the compute-intensive and low-latency infrastructure needed to unlock business insights from trained AI models. POWER9-based, it supports faster data throughput and decreased latency through advanced interconnects such as PCIe Gen4 and OpenCAPI. Both are important for edge AI applications.

As 5G rollout continues across the world, edge computing combined with 5G creates opportunities to enhance digital experiences, improve performance and data security, and enable continuous operations in every industry. Edge brings computation and data storage closer to wherever data is created by people, places and things. We can provide an autonomous management offering that addresses the scale, variability and rate of change in edge environments, in edge-enabled industry solutions and services, and in the solutions that can help you modernize your networks and deliver new services at the edge.

Source: ibm.com

Continue reading

Infrastructure for AI: Why storage matters

Perhaps your organization has recently decided to purchase compute nodes and get started with artificial intelligence (AI). There are many aspects of your IT infrastructure and technology landscape to scrutinize as you prepare for AI workloads — including, and perhaps especially, your storage systems. AI is driven by data, and how your data is stored can significantly affect the outcome of your AI project. Not only that, but the four different stages of AI (ingest, preparation, training and inference) each have different storage needs and requirements.

Unfortunately, some organizations focus on the compute side of AI and overlook the storage side. This singular focus can, and sometimes does, lead to the disruption or complete failure of AI projects. Massive amounts of data are needed to facilitate the AI training stage. This data needs to be ingested, stored and prepared so it can be “fed” to the training stage. Without the ability to ingest, store and consume the necessary data for training, the project will be at risk of failure.

AI projects demand a storage infrastructure with excellent performance, scalability and flexibility. The good news is that today’s storage systems can be purpose-built to meet the needs of AI projects. Two great examples of this are some of the world’s most powerful supercomputers, Sierra and Summit.

Now, let’s look at some requirements.

Workload specifics and the movement of data

The requirements for each stage of the AI pipeline need to be reviewed for the expected workload of your AI application. Workloads vary, but some companies using large data sets can train for long periods of time. Once the training is done, that data is often moved off of critical storage platforms to prepare for a new workload. Managing data manually can be a challenge, so it’s wise to think ahead when considering how data is placed on storage and where it will go once training is done. Finding a platform that can move data automatically for you puts you one step closer to efficient and capable storage management for AI.

After reviewing the implications of your own workload needs, you can decide on the storage technologies that work best for your AI compute infrastructure and project.

Storage needs for different AI stages

Data ingestion. The raw data for AI workloads can come from a variety of structured and unstructured data sources, and you need a very reliable place to store the data. The storage medium could be a high capacity data lake or a fast tier, like flash storage, especially for real-time analytics.

Data preparation. Once stored, the data must be prepared since it is in a “raw” format. The data needs to be processed and formatted for consumption by the remaining phases. File I/O performance is a very important consideration at this stage since you now have a mix of random reads and writes. Take the time to figure out what the performance needs are for your AI pipeline. Once the data is formatted, it will be fed into the neural networks for training.

Illustration 1: Ingest, Data Preparation and Training

Training and inferencing. These stages are very compute intensive and generally require streaming data into the training models. Training is an iterative process, requiring setting and resetting, which is used to create the models. Inferencing can be thought of as the sum of the data and training. The GPUs in the servers, and your storage infrastructure become very important here because of the need for low latency, high throughput and quick response times. Your storage networks need to be designed to handle these requirements as well as the data ingestion and preparation. At scale, this stresses many storage systems, especially ones not prepared for AI workloads, so it’s important to specifically consider whether your storage platform can handle the workload needs in line with your business objectives.

Don’t forget capacity and flexibility

Also consider: Does your storage infrastructure scale easily? Can you expand the storage system as your data needs grow? These are very important questions that have a direct effect on your AI infrastructure requirements.

Make sure you can scale your storage infrastructure up and out with minimal to no disruption to your production operations, keeping pace with data growth in your business. Be flexible enough to consider different storage configurations for the different needs of the AI infrastructure.

Turn to the experts for advice

Careful planning, matching your AI server and modeling requirements to the storage infrastructure, will help you get the most from your investments and lead to success in your AI projects.

These recommendations are just a starting point. Always keep in mind that if you don’t have the expertise in your organization to design and implement the correct AI storage infrastructure, you should work with your vendor to assist and help prepare your storage systems for AI.

Source: ibm.com

Continue reading

Jump-start your AI adoption with AutoML on IBM Power Systems

Are you eager to adopt AI for your business but bogged down by the complexity of machine learning algorithms, the plethora of software technologies and the dearth of personnel with specialized skills? If so, you’re not alone! Even seasoned technologists are overwhelmed by this vast and fragmented AI ecosystem.

Automatic machine learning (AutoML) refers to the methodology of automatically building machine learning pipelines with minimal engineering input, enabling non-specialists to build AI solutions from raw data. AutoML and the associated software offer a promising direction to reduce the complexity in AI development, at least for regular applications, and boost the adoption of AI in enterprises. Read on to learn more about AutoML and why IBM Power Systems is ideal for deploying AutoML frameworks.

The automatic machine learning paradigm

Most often, complete AI solutions are built by teams with complimentary expertise in statistics, machine learning, programming, data engineering and vertical domain. The teams iterate through a complex process involving data preprocessing, feature engineering, machine learning algorithm selection, hyperparameter optimization and validation. This process is typically encapsulated in the form of an end-to-end machine learning pipeline, as shown in figure 1. AutoML aims to automate one or more of these pipeline components based upon the data characteristics and pre-built features (meta learning), and by using esoteric machine learning methods such as Bayesian optimization, genetic programming and reinforcement learning (AI for AI).

Figure 1. Typical end-to-end machine learning pipeline built by AutoML

There is growing interest in AutoML in industry and academia, as evidenced by the recent surge of commercial software (such as IBM AutoAI, H2O Driverless AI) and open source implementations (such as featuretools, auto-sklearn, auto-WEKA, TPOT, AutoKeras and auto-PyTorch). These frameworks functionally differ in the length of the machine learning pipeline and the quantitative methods employed to automate each component. They are capable of automatically building end-to-end machine learning pipelines fitting classical machine learning algorithms as well as deep neural networks (IBM Visual Insights, for example) for industry-scale supervised learning problems.

AutoML is compute bound

Loosely speaking, AutoML is solving a giant optimization problem, treating feature engineering, data processing and machine learning algorithmic choices as yet other dimensions in the hyperparameter space. Benchmark studies have not been able to conclude that any one framework is superior to another in all dimensions. Thus, the accuracies that can be achieved using AutoML are sensitive to the compute time allocated for search and the underlying hardware capabilities.

It is no exaggeration to say that IBM Power Systems AC922 servers are the most suitable hardware infrastructure for AutoML frameworks. After all, they’re the building blocks for the world’s most powerful supercomputers, the US Department of Energy’s Summit and Sierra systems. The major open source AutoML frameworks and H2O Driverless AI can leverage the exclusive compute capabilities of Power Systems, as depicted in figure 2. The Anaconda distribution makes the installation of open source tools a breeze on Power hardware.

Figure 2. The AutoML tools take advantage of Power hardware

Human in the loop

Though AutoML tools can engineer the machine learning pipelines for routine machine learning tasks, that alone is insufficient for building enterprise-grade AI systems. The data cleaning and preprocessing capabilities of the current AutoML tools are quite limited. The wealth of knowledge brought by domain experts from years of experience is unparalleled in data processing and feature engineering. In addition, AutoML tools are prone to overfitting, making engineering intervention necessary.

IBM Systems Lab Services can help jump-start AI adoption in your organization through rapid prototyping and fail fast methodology. Our experienced consultants help you make the right choices of machine learning tools, work with your domain experts in designing features and train your engineers to quickly become data scientists.

Continue reading