IBM Power Systems

IBM Power is IBM's server platform built on the Power processor architecture, with the Power11 family spanning the S1112, S1122 and S1124 rack and tower systems and the E1150 and E1180 high end servers, offering up to 120 Power11 cores and 16 TB of DDR5 memory at the top of the range.

Zero planned downtime for system maintenance is the claim IBM leads with and it explains the whole platform. Power Systems servers are bought by organisations where the application cannot stop, typically core banking, insurance policy administration, retail settlement and manufacturing execution, and for those workloads the relevant comparison is not price per core against commodity hardware but the cost of an outage.

Power Cyber Vault is the more recent argument and it is a sound one. It creates prescriptive, immutable and air gapped copies of data specifically against ransomware, which matters because the failure mode of modern ransomware is that the backups are encrypted too, and an immutable copy the attacker cannot reach is the only reliable answer.

Running a distinct processor architecture is the trade this platform asks a customer to accept. It buys reliability engineering and per core performance that x86 does not match on these workloads, and it costs portability, so the customers who stay are the ones whose applications were written for it. IBM's own announcement of the platform refers to it as IBM Power Systems, and IBM publishes a Power total cost of ownership calculator rather than a rate card.