As enterprises embark on their journeys to adopt innovative hybrid cloud and AI technologies, its increasingly vital for these organizations to have a flexible infrastructure that delivers performance, security, and interoperability to support evolving IT needs. To remain competitive, reduce technology costs, and improve the ability to respond to changing customer needs, enterprises will need platforms that allow workload consumption to ramp up or down quickly, place workloads on cloud or on-site, with a focus on business outcomes and less on infrastructure management. Generative AI also has the potential to be a key factor in business transformation, and enterprises that take a more intentional approach with hybrid cloud could be better positioned to accelerate their impact. 

IBM’s Hybrid Cloud strategy has been focused on harnessing the power of choice and flexibility for clients. That’s why we recently extended the capabilities of Power Virtual Server to deploy in a client data center. This delivers the flexibility around consumption and management capabilities of the cloud while keeping the data on-premises to help address regional compliance and governance requirements of the business. 

Register for our webinar to learn more about the client site capabilities of IBM Power Virtual Server  

In market since 2019 with 21 datacenters available globally, IBM Power Virtual Server provides Power infrastructure-as-a-service, which combines semi-configurable compute, storage, and network infrastructure either in an IBM data center or within your own data center, managed as a service via IBM Cloud®. This is the same reliable, high performing secure Power architecture that enterprises depend on today to run mission critical workloads and these workloads can seamlessly move to the cloud without refactoring.  
With the client datacenter option, a local zone is deployed into the client’s datacenter and connected to IBM Cloud to deliver the same as-a-service experience as the IBM Power Virtual Server service running in IBM’s own datacenters. Moreover, enterprises can scale within a local zone or add new local zones with various IBM Power options to address future growth. Delivering an as-a-service model, with options for IBM site and client site, also helps clients enhance agility, reliability, and security, while optimizing IT operations to meet their diverse needs.

Harnessing the power of choice and flexibility 

Newly introduced IBM Power Virtual Server Private Cloud is engineered to:

• Maintain customer data and workloads on your own site: Enterprises may have workloads or data that is regulated and cannot be hosted off-premises. In some cases, enterprises can have workloads that are sensitive or with ultra-short latency requirements that are better served on site and in very close in proximity with other on-site workloads.    
• Maintain customer data in region and specific geographies in the location of their choice: Country sovereignty regulations are requiring some data and workloads to stay in country. According to a recent IBM Institute of Business Value study, 61% of cloud leaders cite security or compliance as reasons for moving certain workloads from public clouds to private clouds or on-premises data centers. 
• Provide a seamless hybrid cloud experience: Enterprises can foster a unified hybrid cloud landscape by seamlessly integrating Power Virtual Server running both at an IBM site and at a client site location with the ability to manage all the virtual machines (VMs) and infrastructure effortlessly through a unified user interface. Clients can receive the flexibility utilizing as-a-service with intentional workload placement on and off premises.  
• Deliver predictable charging model with committed monthly spend combined with flexible consumption with metered usage-based pricing: Both IBM site and at client site offerings include compute, memory, storage, and operating system licenses that are fully metered by the hour allowing clients to pay for how much they use each month with no upfront payment.  
• Streamline IT operations: Whether in the cloud or at an enterprise’s site, IBM manages the infrastructure, freeing enterprises to focus on business outcomes and less on managing infrastructure. IBM will own, deliver, and set up the Power Virtual Server in datacenter of choice, and provide a fully managed solution, including monitoring, security, firmware updates, and infrastructure management. 
• Enhanced security and control of data: IBM Power Virtual Server is designed to provide comprehensive security for IBM Power infrastructure by integrating with IBM Cloud tooling to manage security. This alleviates the need to manage Power infrastructure security with the added benefit of maintaining sensitive data and workload on-premises.  

Support and availability 

IBM Power Virtual Server is a continuation of our commitment to help enterprises further modernize their IT journey to drive performance with choice and flexibility. This private option is generally available from IBM and certified Business Partners in the following countries: United States, Canada, Netherlands, Denmark, Austria, Germany, Belgium, Luxembourg, Switzerland, United Kingdom, and Australia. To locate a business partner, please visit IBM’s partner directory.

Deriving value from data with AI on IBM Power 

IBM Power clients have valuable data residing on their servers, giving them an opportunity with enterprise AI to derive insights from this data to help address business challenges such as providing a more seamless and secure customer experience. IBM Power10 has on-chip acceleration for production-ready AI at the point of data to enable faster time to insight and lower latency.

Technology services provider OpenTech utilizes OpenXAI platform, a private document sourced knowledge-based generative AI chat application that generates content for users based on their own private data. Choosing the right infrastructure to run OpenXAI was critical for OpenTech as the company’s chat application was being trained on sensitive and confidential documentation. Furthermore, OpenTech needed to stay on-prem within the country to comply with local regulations regarding data privacy and sovereignty.

IBM and OpenTech joint clients use IBM Power10 processor-based servers to run generative AI chatbots that talk to leverage private documentation to keep confidential data secure. “Putting our OpenXAI platform on Power10 gives us the best of both worlds. Our open-source technology stack makes development and expansion easy to handle as we add new features constantly,” said Moatasim Al-Masri, CEO, OpenTech. “In addition, clustering multiple Power10 servers together with IBM Storage solutions gives our clients a unique and robust generative AI solution that takes the worry out of having to find hardware to match the software. This solution is powerful for today and into the future and can be a closed on-prem private solution or a private corporate cloud solution hosted on-prem, keeping confidential information secure to meet data privacy and sovereignty requirements.”

Register here to join us at IBM TechXchange October 21-24 to learn more about AI capabilities on IBM Power