In the last few years, we have seen hybrid environments become the dominant IT infrastructure architecture across industries. According to the IBM study “Build a more intentional hybrid cloud: The key to continuous innovation”, it is projected that clients who use an intentional hybrid by design approach in configuring their IT infrastructure can deliver up to 3x higher ROI over five years from their digital transformation efforts than those that do not. This approach involves enterprises making deliberate workload placement decisions with desired business outcomes in mind, with their resiliency, performance, security, and compliance needs at the forefront.

We believe a hybrid cloud by design strategy is especially important given the rate and pace of AI adoption today. A recent IBM Institute for Business Value study revealed 75% of CEOs think that the enterprise with the most advanced generative AI will have the biggest competitive advantage. The influx of data associated with AI will no doubt fuel tremendous business innovations, but requires strategic considerations which include where the data resides, compute capacity, and necessary security and compliance controls.

IBM Power is designed for AI and advanced workloads, positioning enterprises to inference and deploy AI algorithms on sensitive data and transactions that reside on Power systems. More specifically, IBM Power Virtual Server can help enterprises by providing a flexible, scalable, and secured platform to run mission-critical workloads, including AI, that extends on-premises environments to the cloud.

At the same time, clients want to be agile and drive stronger business outcomes with simpler experiences. This includes ramping up quickly, spending less time maintaining infrastructure, and paying as they go. With a flexible as a service offering, we’re helping clients with frictionless workload migration and modernization from on-premises to the cloud. This is possible because of architectural parity between IBM Power and IBM Cloud that helps our clients achieve growth while adopting innovative AI and hybrid cloud technologies. Power Virtual Servers delivers a virtual machine as a service on Power architecture, engineered  to run your mission critical applications. With the same architecture on premises and on cloud, workload migration does not require re-platforming to move it to other clouds. 

We are continuing to make improvements to our IBM Power Virtual Server offering on IBM Cloud, including enhancing the user experience and capabilities and expanding the infrastructure itself, so clients can focus on business outcomes.

Register for Webinar "Expand to hybrid cloud and drive business outcomes with IBM Power Virtual Server"

A smoother transition to IBM Power Virtual Server

The advancements made to the onboarding and user experience of Power Virtual Server are aimed at helping our clients enhance usability, reduce costs, and minimize risk:

• Backup-aaS: Clients can replace repetitive, complex backup administration with intelligent automation providing enterprise class data protection and cyber resiliency for Oracle, SAP and DB2 workloads running on Power AIX and Linux. Powered by Cobalt Iron Compass® and IBM Storage Spectrum Protect, Power Virtual Server customers can automatically leverage this fully-managed and automated service to protect data optimizing administration time. This offering will be called Secure Automated Backup with Cobalt Iron Compass, and is planned to be available in the IBM Cloud catalog in April.
• Disaster Recovery: Business Continuity is of utmost importance for enterprises that run mission-critical workloads and their resiliency depends on how quickly enterprises can recover (RTO) from a disaster event and how much data they can recover (RPO) after the event. Disaster events can be hardware, software failures or catastrophic incidents such as fires, storms, earthquakes, etc. and a highly reliable, secured disaster recovery solution is a must. IBM Power Virtual Server now enables business continuity for cloud-to-cloud workloads with the Global Replication Services (GRS) across 16 of its 20 data centers and also provides automated services (built using GRS) to setup and manage the replication-enabled volumes. Where available, this makes Disaster Recovery Orchestration a simple, single-click, DIY process that addresses more than 15+ complex, manual configuration steps involved with setting up a disaster recovery process.
• Cloud Security and Compliance: With built-in security and compliance controls, IBM Cloud aims to help organizations across industries address their cybersecurity and regulatory requirements, while providing the benefits and flexibility of the cloud in a secured environment. IBM’s enterprise cloud platform includes innovative confidential computing capabilities and “Keep Your Own Key” (KYOK) encryption. With these capabilities, only the client retains sole access to the keys, meaning data is visible only to them and no one else – not even IBM can access it.
• Migration: Designed so that workloads can be migrated quickly with step-by-step automated migration for IBM AIX and IBM i. For larger workloads, such as those up to 10TB, data transfer can be accelerated with high-speed network and IBM Aspera or by utilizing an appliance-based model for data transfer. This solution accommodates both options.
• SAP Installation: We have implemented a deployable architecture that streamlines the Power Virtual Server SAP installation process, which can help reduce the installation time.
• Network: To simplify network configuration, we have implemented Power Edge Router (PER) to integrate into IBM Cloud to make the user experience seamless. We have also provided a suite of automation templates compatible with Terraform and IBM Cloud Schematics to reduce the complexity and investment in time required to deploy IBM Cloud VPN connectivity into a Power Virtual Server workspace.

IBM Power Virtual Server is a continuation of our commitment to help enterprises further modernize their IT journey to drive performance and scalability. Earlier this year, IBM Power Virtual Server received the “Most Loved" Award” in the Infrastructure-as-a-Service category from TrustRadius, a site which helps technology buyers make informed decisions on products by providing verified reviews and ratings.

Reach out to the your point of contact today to commence your
transformation journey with IBM Power Virtual Server

New Center of Excellence to enhance onboarding journey for clients

Our new IBM Power Virtual Server Center of Excellence (CoE) further accelerates our clients’ IT transformations by providing additional support during the onboarding experience. This includes providing delivery assets and automation tools, accelerating Minimum Viable Product (MVP) and Proof of Concept (PoC) engagements, coaching Business Partners through the delivery process, and further expediting deal closings.

This approach involves a shared success model with IBM co-investing with Business Partners by providing expertise, deployment tools, and best practices. We help enable Business Partners by creating assets such as configuration patterns, provisioning automation tools and training. Collaboration with IBM Technical Sales and Client Engineering teams includes delivering workshops, defining MVP scope/use cases, target architectures, and success criteria.
 

Reach out to the Center of Excellence today to commence your
transformation journey with IBM Power Virtual Server

Modernize with Red Hat Open Shift on IBM Power Virtual Server

Clients can begin their modernization journey by deploying Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Power Virtual Server. Installer Provisioned Infrastructure (IPI) is designed to simplify and automate the deployment  to provision a Red Hat OpenShift cluster on Power. With the release of Red Hat OpenShift 4.14, a tech preview of IPI for Power Virtual Server is available for clients and Business Partners to get started.

Look for more new capabilities for Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Power and
Power Virtual Server at KubeCon Europe in Paris March 19th-22nd.

Expansion of data centers across the globe

Now with 21 datacenters worldwide, IBM continues to expand with the new availability of IBM Power Virtual Server in Chennai, India.

IBM Power Virtual Server will offer businesses in India a flexible, scalable, and secured platform for running mission-critical workloads, including AI, that extends on-premises environments to the cloud. This will also provide an oppportunity for businesses operating in regulated industries as they can gain more flexibility to store and compute data within the country while they strive to meet their necessary security and compliance requirements.

With the continuing expansion of data centers around the world and paying as you go, IBM Power Virtual Server further provides enterprises the environment required to modernize and protect their on-premises development, test, and production environments.

Statements regarding IBM's future direction and intent are subject to change or withdrawal without notice, and represent goals and objectives only.