Tech titan IBM announced on Wednesday, Sept. 8, the new IBM Power E1080 server, the first in a new family of servers based on the new IBM Power10 processor, designed specifically for hybrid cloud environments.
The company said the IBM Power10-equipped E1080 server is engineered to be one of the most secured server platforms and is designed to help clients operate a “frictionless” hybrid cloud experience across their entire IT infrastructure.
“When we were designing the E1080, we had to be cognizant of how the pandemic was changing not only consumer behavior, but also our customer’s behavior and needs from their IT infrastructure,” said Dylan Boday, VP of product management for AI and Hybrid Cloud at IBM.
“The E1080 is IBM’s first system designed from the silicon up for hybrid cloud environments, a system tailor-built to serve as the foundation for our vision of a dynamic and secure, frictionless hybrid cloud experience.”
The IBM Power E1080 server is built around the IBM Power10 processor. Designed by IBM and manufactured by Samsung using 7nm EUV process technology, IBM Power10 is IBM’s first commercially available 7nm processor.
With IBM Power10 at the heart of the system, the IBM Power E1080 server can deliver up to 30% more performance per core and over 50% better total capacity at the socket and system level as compared to the previous generation IBM Power E980 server. This translates to 33% lower energy consumption for the same workload on the IBM Power E1080 as compared to the IBM Power E980 , giving customers the platform to consolidate workloads and save on hardware and software costs.
For example, an IBM said a Power customer projected that they could consolidate an industry-standard transactional database running across 126 x86-based servers down to two IBM Power E1080 servers. This projection would translate to an 80% reduction in server energy use and a 70% reduction in per-core software licenses for the customer.
IBM said the Power10 also provides new enhancements for securing consolidated workloads. The Power10 processor has the capability to scale with transparent memory encryption, which is designed to simplify and support end-to-end security without impacting performance.
Compared to IBM Power9, accelerated encryption performance is enabled by IBM Power10 having 4x the number of encryption engines per core, and translates into a 2.5x faster per core performance for AES encryption compared to the previous generation of IBM Power servers.
IBM said it offers security control solutions at every level of the system stack — from the foundational hardware like the processor and memory — to key software like the operating system, hypervisor, and applications.
The E1080 uses IBM PowerVM as its built-in hypervisor, which has significantly fewer Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) than competitive hypervisors as catalogued by the US Government National Institute of Standards and Technology’s National Vulnerabilities Database (NVD).
Finally, the IBM Power E1080 server and Power10 processor bring new enterprise AI capabilities right to where the data resides, on the server. IBM Power10’s four Matrix Math Accelerator (MMA) engines per core that can drive up to 5x improvements for AI inference as compared to the IBM Power E980 server.
