IBM Systems Magazine, Power Systems - April 2018 - 25
place versus starting over from scratch," Virnig says. As a Linux technology-based data platform, HANA aligns well with IBM's overall strategy to enable the data tier and key applications that connect to it. "The reliability that Power Systems offers, with the lowest percentage annual server downtime, the ability to run up to eight SAP HANA production instances per server, and savings on operational costs from server consolidation are examples of the value the POWER platform brings to SAP workloads," Bennett says. More than 1,000 clients are now running SAP HANA on Power Systems, accelerating business processes and gaining more business insights on a platform built for the flexibility, resiliency and performance required in the digital era, Bennett says. "We have also worked with our ecosystem partners to allow our clients to manage HANA on the POWER platform with the same tools and management software they manage the rest of their SAP landscape." As new technologies or ISVs enter the marketplace, IBM evaluates if they would be a good fit in the ecosystem and if Linux on POWER is a good fit for them, King says. IBM can quickly implement and leverage solutions that are based on Linux. "We've built a solid infrastructure leveraging the ˆ More than 1,000 clients are now running SAP HANA on Power Systems Power Systems platform and our technical partners to extend acceleration and networking capability to the platform, with support by all the major Linux OSes that are enabled for cloud deployment," she says. "By laying a solid foundation, as data and AI applications emerge, we can easily add more building blocks to the solution stack." A Better Solution As IBM tunes and optimizes solutions that run on POWER, it finds that some technologies run faster on Power Systems than on Intel* x86-based systems. "With machine learning or deep learning models, we determine where we can help clients run their models faster," King says. "For clients, that can make all the difference in the world when you're talking about improving from days to hours or hours to minutes." With models becoming more complex and requiring more processing power for data crunching, businesses need better performing infrastructures. That's where the POWER platform earns it stripes. IBM's OpenPOWER LC servers deliver up to 2x the performance and 12x the workload density versus Intel x86-based services (ibm. co/2EA4yJJ). "When you want to add a new SAP application that runs on HANA, the advantage of the POWER platform is you don't have to purchase a new server to run it on," Bennett says. "In the x86 world, there are many more restrictions on what you can run virtualized. On POWER, you have much more flexibility to run applications on the same server with HANA. This simplifies IT and gives the business the ability to add more workloads. It can also lower operational costs by supporting server consolidation, resulting in smaller data center footprints Investing in Open Source In September 2013, IBM announced plans to invest $1 billion in new Linux* and open-source technologies for IBM Power Systems* (ibm.co/1bz3foy). That investment helped shape the Linux on POWER* ecosystem. "A key focus of the overall investment was to double down on the value of Linux based/open-source solutions to key clients around the world," says Terri Virnig, vice president of Power Ecosystem and Strategy. "Since we announced this, we have remained focused on open solutions that have value to our clients to solve data-centric and artificial intelligence workload challenges, with a choice of deployment options." -B.M. ibmsystemsmag.com APRIL 2018 // 25