IBM Cloud… Now with Power
Written by Doug Polen, Software Sales Specialist with Evolving Solutions
We recently sponsored a table at a local analytics event where we showcased an IBM offering called PowerAI Vision. We took some pictures around the event and used PowerAI to tap into its machine learning capabilities to identify faces and badges, without the need for any programming. It was pretty cool, especially since there was no programming involved and the training was done in the 15 minutes before the conference kicked off.
While I was speaking with a client about their machine learning use cases at this event, I discovered that PowerAI was available in the IBM Cloud catalog (we’ll talk more about PowerAI in a future blog, so be sure to follow us on LinkedIn for more).
Back to this cool discovery. I mean, what’s the big deal, right? Why does this warrant a blog post? I am helping my organization to build out a cloud practice and up until now, I’ve focused exclusively on the x86 space. When I asked my teammates if they were aware of this offering I got a mixed response…the folks who deal with POWER servers on a daily basis were aware, but the majority of the team was surprised when I told them about this.
IBM now offers POWER servers as a bare metal offering in their public cloud (SAP Certified, GPU’s and x86 also available).
Currently, OpenLinux is available as an operating system, but I have been told by IBM resources that AIX is coming very soon. My perception is that IBM really only marketed this to their hardware clients, but it really has not been well communicated as part of their overall cloud offerings which has focused heavily on the VMWare affiliate program in 2018.
Let’s be clear, though, it’s still all about the use case. Cloud doesn’t make sense for everyone. But the cases where it makes a lot of sense, I see this being of great value, especially for anyone who has requirements to keep data in-country or in-region. Disaster recovery and new workloads would also be good drivers to look at a cloud model.
For years, IBM Power clients have been challenged with how to deal with Disaster Recovery. They need a place they can easily fail over to should a disaster occur. IBM now offers an Opex model that might fit their needs. There are also unique use cases that only the IBM Cloud can address. In fact, we just helped a client set up a cloud environment in Canada on dedicated infrastructure because they needed to keep the archived data in-country, and IBM was the best solution.
I believe only IBM and Google bring this capability to the market. Is this for everyone? No. But, I think there are many clients that might want to take a look at this option before upgrading to their next machine.
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Doug Polen is a Software Sales Specialist at Evolving Solutions. He has been with Evolving Solutions since 2015, after spending 16 years at IBM as a Software Client Leader and Client Executive.
He specializes in IBM PassPort Advantage, Software as a Service, Analytics, Cloud, Cognitive, IoT, Security & Social solutions and holds numerous IBM software certifications.
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