IBM has unveiled its new Power E1080 server, the first in a new family of servers based on the new IBM Power10 processor announced last year, and which features faster performance, greater AI inference capabilities and improved security support than the company’s previous E980 servers.
“We’re allowing hybrid cloud customers to respond faster to their business demands, and to protect all of their data from core to cloud,” said Ken King, general manager of IBM Power at IBM.
Like many other companies IBM is looking to respond to business and operational trends that have been evolving for years, but accelerated as Covid-19 pandemic restrictions changed how businesses conducted their work activities and accessed their cloud resources. A recent CEO survey conducted by IBM’s Institute of Business Value’s 2021 CEO Study showed that 56% of 3,000 CEOs surveyed said the need to enhance operational agility and flexibility is what they will most aggressively pursue over the next two to three years.
The need for improved security to protect against cyber attacks was the next highest priority revealed in the survey, according to Steve Sibley, manager of partner engagement and technical enablement at IBM.
“There really has been an emphasis the last two years around the need for increased flexibility from an operations and spending standpoint, as well as a need to improve security and resiliency,” Sibley said. “There’s also a growing need to get more value from data with AI, and a desire to ensure continuous operations and access to the cloud.”
The answer to these trends for many companies has been to migrate to a hybrid cloud model that doesn’t rely solely on public cloud or on-premises resources, and IBM designed both the Power 10 processor and now the E1080 with that hybrid model in mind.
Dylan Boday, vice president of product management for AI and Hybrid Cloud at IBM, described the E1080 as IBM’s “first system designed from the silicon up for hybrid cloud environments,” and capable of delivering up to 50% more performance and scalability and 5x more inference performance per socket than the IBM Power E980.
The E1080 also comes with significant security enhancements with the ability to support quantum-safe cryptography when a quantum-safe security standard becomes available, said Satya Sharma, IBM fellow and CTO of cognitive systems. New security tools designed for hybrid cloud environments include transparent memory encryption so there is no additional management setup, and 4x the encryption engines per core, allowing for 2.5x faster AES encryption as compared to the E980.
“We are doing end-to-end security with full-stack encryption,” including IBM’s homomorphic encryption capability, which allows computing of encrypted data without the need for it to be decrypted first, he said. IBM also is allowing for more flexible key management by enterprises that want to create their own security keys and don’t want to be assigned keys by their cloud providers.
In a nod to greater flexibility, the E1080 also supports per-minute metering of Red Hat software including Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat Enterprise Linux, 4.1x greater OpenShift containerized throughput per core compared to x86-based servers. Overall, the ability to use a few E1080s where many more X86-based servers might have been required translates to a lower carbon footprint and energy requirement.
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