IBM debuts new servers based on custom Power11 processor

IBM Corp. today introduced a new line of servers, the Power11 series, based on a custom processor of the same name.

The product family will include four machines on launch. IBM will also offer access to the Power11 chip via its public cloud. According to the company, customers can expect up to 55% better core performance than comparable servers powered by Intel Corp. silicon.

Power11 is designed to provide 99.9999% availability, which corresponds to under 40 seconds of downtime per year. Maintenance tasks such as patching don’t require administrators to take applications offline. When a Power11 server must be shut down to make changes, the onboard software can move the applications that it hosts to another machine and thereby avoid downtime.

According to IBM, another benefit of Power11’s maintenance software is it automates the patching workflow. Usually, updating an important server requires a significant amount of planning and testing beforehand. Power11 speeds up that process to save time for administrators.

IBM will ship the server series with a cybersecurity technology called Cyber Vault. According to the company, it can encrypt customer data with a cryptography algorithm that can’t be broken by a quantum computer.

Traditional cryptography algorithms can in theory be bypassed using a large-scale quantum machine. Such a machine hasn’t yet been developed, but the technology still poses risks. Hackers could steal encrypted data and wait until a quantum computer capable of decrypting it becomes available. Quantum-safe algorithms such as the one used by the Power11 series is designed to mitigate that risk. 

Cyber Vault also performs other tasks. According to IBM, the technology is capable of detecting ransomware in under a minute. For added measure, it creates immutable copies of customer data that ransomware can’t delete or encrypt.

Power-efficiency was another priority for IBM while designing the Power11 series. According to the company, a new Energy Efficient setting can cut workloads’ energy usage by up to 28%. 

The new server line is the first in the Power portfolio to support IBM’s Spyre Accelerator. Previewed last year, it’s an artificial intelligence chip with 25.6 billion transistors that are organized into 32 cores and 14 miles of microscopic wiring. The processor is packaged into a PCIe card that can be plugged into servers to speed up inference workloads.

“We are taking advantage of the full IBM stack to deliver hybrid cloud, AI, and automation capabilities while building on our decades-long reputation as a trustworthy hybrid infrastructure for essential workloads,” said Tom McPherson, general manager of IBM’s Power Systems group.

The four servers in the initial Power11 lineup are headlined by the Power E1180, which takes up an entire data center rack. It can be equipped with up to 256 Power11 cores and 64 terabytes of DDR5 memory. The most affordable machine in the series, the Power S1122, feature a considerably smaller chassis that has room for up to 60 Power11 cores.

IBM will make the servers generally available on July 25 along with a Power11-based virtual machine series in its public cloud. The Spyre Accelerator is set to launch in the fourth quarter.

Image: IBM