Power 9 - a new milestone in the Power success story

With the Power 9 availability during 2018, there has not only been a jolt within the Power genealogy, but significantly towards the x86 world as well.

Double core performance and 1.4 times more memory bandwidth compared to x86 speak for themselves. Compared to Power 8, Power 9 records a 1.5-fold performance leap and scores with twice the memory bandwidth.

From a functionality point of view, improved thread performance, optimization for analytical processes and "Extreme Big Data" are to be noted. There are also new developments in the field of next-gen memory and the on-chip architecture scores with Open CAPI and BW improvements.

Power 9 offers two memory architectures: Scale-out (Direct Attach Memory) with up to 170 GB/s and Scale-up (Buffered Memory) with up to 230 GB/s per socket and extreme capacity: up to 8TB/socket.

If we then add the doubling of bandwidth from Native-PCIe-Gen3 (Power 8) to Native-PCIe-Gen4, we have by far the best performing system on the market. Power 9 also offers about 50% better scalability than Power 8 in the field of multithreading (SMT8) (comparisons to the x86 systems, which are still limited to SMT2, do not present themselves).

If we think about the constantly changing workloads of a fully populated IT landscape, it would also be important to mention that there is dynamic switching between the different SMT modes, which optimizes the workload and keeps applications like Hana always on the safe side.

From a commercial point of view, savings of easily more than 50 percent are possible within two to three years compared to e.g. Power 7: 3x performance/core, more than 12 percent additional capacity coupled with 60 percent cores reduction noticeably reduce license and maintenance fees.

Another building block of our partnership

If we focus our gaze and look at our successful partnership with SAP, we can proudly say that technology integration and our collaboration have reached a new milestone.

Power has become the platform of choice for mission critical enterprise environments. And that in just under three years! More than 2250 customers worldwide are witness to this. According to our own surveys and the available analyst data, IBM has achieved a market share of over 20 percent in the Hana business.

At the beginning of May at Sapphire in Orlando, Intel announced that it had a 75 percent market share. Conversely, that would increase our share to 25 percent. We are eagerly waiting for independent market surveys to confirm this.

Based on the experience of the past years in the Cognitive, AI and SAP environment, Power 9 has been further optimized to support the SAP Business Suite. As before, the entire Power platform is certified for Hana (from the scale-out boxes with up to 24 cores and 4 TB RAM to the midrange E950 with up to 48 cores and 16 TB RAM to the enterprise E980 with a maximum of 192 cores and 64 TB RAM).

It goes without saying that traditional workloads such as AIX will also continue to be supported - here the roadmap shows guaranteed paths until 2028. This, too, is part of the usual investment protection package and allows our customers to plan for the long term and schedule transitions as they see fit.

Since the migration to the Hana platform is taking place more slowly than SAP itself had assumed (according to Hasso Plattner in the Sapphire keynote he had assumed about three years, now five years have already gone by and there is still no end in sight), we also stand steadfastly by the support of traditional SAP Solutions until 2025 and beyond, if necessary.

Regarding Linux, it should be noted that the trend towards Little Endian continues and with the availability of RHEL 8 now also fully includes Redhat along with Suse. (Unlike Big Endian, Little Endian is a format for storage where the Least Significant Byte (LSB) comes first and is stored at the lowest memory address). As usual, the same SAP product release dates and lifecycles apply as for x86. This also applies to the source and release schedules.

The aforementioned move to Little Endian for Linux on Power is also accelerating the adoption of the Power platform by 3rd party operators. Of course, the steep growth of Hana on Linux on Power is also driving the expansion of the entire SAP-related ecosystem.

This expansion of applications now includes key ISV solutions. In turn, the growing interest of ISVs continues to expand the circles for Hana on Power (HoP).

Another key factor is still the unmatched IBM virtualization. It provides a link for all kinds of SAP solutions and is still "built in and free of charge".

Last but not least, here's a benchmark tidbit we achieved in December 2018 with a fully loaded Power 9 E980: It achieved a throughput of 1,149,020 SAPS, which supported 205,000 simultaneous S&D benchmark users. This is about twice the throughput of the latest Intel Platinum-based Skylake systems.

All in all, the Power 9 systems show on average about 25 percent more SAP transaction input per core compared to the Power 8 systems. The Power Platform-only Power Enterprise pools have also been enhanced, combined with Elastic Capacity on Demand, both of which result in dynamic system utilization and significant economic efficiency, as well as live partition mobility, which allows customers to migrate running workloads between systems to ensure uninterrupted availability.

We probably don't need to sing the praises of RAS features anymore. It is still unmatched - from flexibility to mainframe-comparable security coefficients.

SAP Hana on Power -Trends and Facts

A word about the unparalleled success story of Hana on Power. Last year, IBM received the SAP Pinnacle Award "SAP Global Partner of the Year - Infrastructure" and in the first quarter of 2019 we went one better and won the SAP Innovation Award three times: once with the Technical University of Munich "Breakthrough in protein analysis advances war on cancer", once with Coop from Switzerland "Sustainable shopping and vision of Zero Waste: Coop improving their customer experience with AI" and again with Indus Motors Toyota Company.

Currently, more than 60 CSPs and MSPs are using IBM Power for SAP workloads. In the meantime, the cloud market for SAP has developed significantly in the direction of IBM Power. To name just a few references: Freudenberg IT, Itelligence, CTAC, Seidor, Dedagroup and D.F.I.

Cloud computing or on-premises

IBM has Power systems in the cloud today and will also deploy Power 9 systems for SAP workloads (including SAP Hana) in the IBM Cloud this year. The solution was driven by massive "failures" on x86 and lack of competitiveness against AWS and others.

Both TCO and RAS availability are superior on Power. And yet, I keep hearing from customers that SAP is step-motherly towards one of the implementation methods - SAP on-premises.

In a sense, it is put in the "dirty corner" and everything revolves around cloud. That was also the tenor of this year's Sapphire, straight from the desk of a prophetic Hasso Plattner. In the process, some things are forgotten.

First:

The in-memory Hana concept was originally tailored to the commodity market and was to be limited to x86 only. This is taking revenge today, because the appliance beginnings are no longer up to date (even SAP is advocating TDI, Tailored Datacenter Integration, wherever possible) and Hana is bursting at the seams.

New strategies such as data tiering are sold as achievements and yet are only attempts to contain an exponential growth that has been apparent for a long time. And the cloud is slowly mutating into a mystical medium that catches everything and everyone.

Yet it is simply as good and as affordable as the underlying infrastructure platform. Companies like Freudenberg IT are not building their cloud concept on power out of sheer philanthropy, but because it gives them a competitive edge over AWS and the like - technologically and commercially.

Second:

The commitment to a cloud environment can be far more long-term and non-cancelable than ever intended, not to mention the question of how to ever get sensitive data out of the cloud.

Every experienced analyst therefore clearly advocates a hybrid cloud strategy. And this is also our company philosophy. A healthy mix of on-premises and cloud gives every company a stable, secure, controllable and affordable IT strategy.

Readers can see what implementing such a strategy looks like in reality and what challenges arise from the observations of one of our most successful partners, Freudenberg IT.

We don't just leave it at the technological and commercial aspects, but are also involved in the academic field. We have been cooperating with the Hasso Plattner Institute (HPI) in Potsdam since 2016 and their online course "Future in Computing - IBM Power 9 and beyond" has been running on OpenHPI.de since May 1 of this year.

And recently, HPI broke the mark of 1500 participants. This cooperation is very important for IBM, as it serves to adapt our offerings to the constantly changing requirements of IT, customers and business conditions.

We want to enter into dialog with future generations and benefit from their unbiased ideas. This trend is also strongly noticeable in SAP itself, with new and young top executives taking the helm and many of them being offspring of HPI.

And they all chant the mantra: " Innovation, innovation, innovation!"
In summary, we can look back on a surprisingly steep success curve of our SAP/IBM cooperation in the Hana environment and are confidently striving to increase our market share - measured against the still outstanding adoption curve of the Hana platform, 50 percent market share in the foreseeable future does not seem to be an unreasonable goal.