As business conditions transform, legacy infrastructure such as aged Power systems can become inflexible as their applications can be prone to outages, capacity issues and high maintenance demands, impacting businesses’ ability to evolve quickly. Many organisations are looking at ways to lower costs and achieve greater agility, security and resiliency.
What we see as one of the strongest arguments for modernisation is the multiple threats of cybercrime, which are constantly evolving. One approach we see to address these business needs and gain immediate savings is to invest in modernisation, allowing you to focus on simplifying and optimising your IT environments, applications and processes.
At Meridian, we understand that you need to feel confident that modernising your current Power system applications will bring tangible benefits in terms of finances, smooth operations and a streamlined IT environment. Leading us to the question of when is the right time to modernise your environment.
While each business has its own unique considerations before going down the path to modernise legacy applications, let us unpack for you 5 significant benefits of modernising your applications and environments with IBM Power10 agile IT operations.
The new generation IBM Power10 is designed to be much faster, more secure, and provide more storage to keep up with the demand for data. Now has never been a better time to explore modernising your historic IBM power environment. For true peace of mind.
Let’s look closer.
Security & resilience
To meet today’s security challenges, every layer of your organisation’s IT hardware and software stack must remain secure. Undoubtedly, we are all finding it challenging, and it is becoming more difficult to maintain the security and resilience of infrastructure and applications as the sophistication of attacks increases.
As we have seen in recent months, there has been a rapid increase in the scale and frequency of cyberattacks, with the number increasing by 28% in the third quarter of 2022 compared to the same period in 2021.
Often ageing infrastructure is not equipped to deal with the advanced level of modern security threats we are currently seeing, which can leave a weakness in your business’s defences.
What we are excited about here at Meridian is that IBM Power10’s multi-layered approach to security gives you complete visibility of your hardware and software. The new IBM Power10’s hardware-accelerated transparent memory encryption, quantum-safe cryptography and fully homomorphic encryption protect your data with comprehensive end-to-end security at every layer of the stack.
Additionally, running Red Hat OpenShift in a virtual machine provides low-latency, reliable communication to your enterprise data with PowerVM Virtual I/O Server. Improving performance through fewer network hops and boosts security because the traffic never has to leave the physical server.
Comprehensive hybrid cloud management
At Meridian, we see it often; businesses want to stay with their current systems—especially if they’ve appreciated the performance of their IBM Power Systems over the years. But, as companies increasingly shift to a hybrid cloud IT model and explore the benefits AI can bring, the need for constant and consistent management across the entire environment is becoming more vital for observation and automation approaches.
At Meridian, we acknowledge that we already live in a hybrid cloud world, which is why we see the value in the IBM Power10 as an upgrade for our Power clients looking towards a hybrid cloud approach. Power10 is built for the next wave of digital transformation and modernisation, with benefits including a frictionless experience that extends mission-critical workloads and deduces insights 5X faster than Power E980 due to enhanced in-core AI inferencing ability.
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Performance – In addition to savings through pay-per-use and scaling up and down, the Power10 offers cost benefits through its performance. Container workloads are processed 4.1 times faster on these new systems than on an average Intel server, meaning you need far fewer servers to run the same workload. This can also mean less floor space and fewer software licenses; for example, for operating systems or business-critical applications that run on the servers such as Oracle or SAP, the benefits and return received pay for themselves.
Energy – In terms of energy consumption, this cuts both ways. On the one hand, fewer Power10 servers can handle the same number of workloads as most conventional servers, which means that the energy consumption per workload is much lower. On the other hand, due to its new design, a Power10 server uses 33% less Power than a Power 9 server and 52% less than a Power8 server.
Also, due to its performance improvement and energy-efficient operation, Power10 can provide many organisations with substantial cost savings and a significantly lower footprint. In a study, IBM compared the footprint of Oracle Database Servers on Power10 with Power 9 and Intel servers finding that two Power10 systems can handle the same amount of Oracle workloads as 126 Intel or 3 Power 9 servers.
The Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) is also lower. If you are currently paying maintenance on your existing box, moving now can save you money compared to waiting until it’s mission-critical. Smaller, more compact Power10 servers allow you to run an equivalent set of applications at comparable throughput levels because it provides a 55% lower 3-year TCO.
Flexible, efficient utilisation
For critical business workloads that have traditionally needed to reside on-premises, they can now be moved into the cloud as workloads and needs demand.
The IBM PowerVM hypervisor allows you to manage spikes in demand and supports more cloud workloads per server. Sharing pools of CPU cores across nodes and managing demand can help improve performance, donating unused processor cycles to nodes needing extra capacity.
Some of the opportunities we are seeing Power10 paving are the flexibility of a hybrid cloud, year-on-year increasing cost savings on licenses, floor space and energy and ultimately, a sustainable business with a smaller footprint. And all of this is relatively easy to realise by upgrading to Power10.
Teams can also incrementally modernise their existing AIX, IBM, and Linux applications by extending them with new cloud-native services, allowing the ability to capitalise on existing investments and drive incremental transformation, saving money, expediting time-to-value, and minimising risk.
Meridian can make this process even easier for IBMi clients with Merlin, a set of tools that run in Red Hat OpenShift to guide and assist developers.
Ready to scale up? Hello Power10!
We have highlighted some of the leading offers we see an IBM Power10 upgrade can have against previous Power systems, focusing on maximising future reliability and modernising applications. From our perspective here at Meridian, we see enormous benefits in modernising your legacy IBM Power system sooner rather than later, ensuring that the transition is as quick and smooth as possible – especially when mission-critical data is involved. There is also the opportunity to explore hosting power workloads in a cloud service as an option for modernisation if a traditional upgrade is not the right fit.
Meridian for your Modernisation.
Meridian IT excels at application availability and modernisation as we support our network of over 160 OEM partners and service professionals with modernisation strategies to help you integrate the applications you run and assist with day-to-day management.
Our proven onboarding process allows for smooth integration of our technical experience to understand and follow your unique business processes.
Furthermore, our IBM Power experts understand the intricacies of the operating systems (IBMi, AIX, Linux) and know what it takes to manage and run the administration, including tuning, updates, backups, and more.
Keen to explore how to begin your journey to modernisation?
Why not get in touch with us for a FREE Power Pulse Check? Our Power10 Capacity Check involves a no-obligation discussion to determine your organisation’s readiness to upgrade.
Or if a Power10 upgrade is off the cards for your business right now due to resourcing and budget constraints? Chat with us here at Meridian.
Alternatives include a cloud-hosted platform for Power that will suit your specific needs before your current power system hits mission critical.
Get help and support from the experts at Meridian IT and book your Power Pulse BOOK NOW.