IBM AIX Power Systems TCO

IBM AIX Power systems are enterprise-class open standards-based Unix servers that support critical applications and database workloads having high I/O and memory requirements, and require maximum performance, availability, security and scalability. IBM’s AIX Power systems have been the most popular Unix server line in the world for over a decade for a number of compounding reasons. As a whole, IBM’s AIX Power server platform has countless industry leading benchmarks and application specific achievements that attrct businesses for specific uses cases, but after factoring in software license costs, the total cost of ownership numbers makes the IBM Power platform the obvious choice.

Although companies of any size can dramatically lower their overall costs by switching to an IBM Power server, larger companies can save millions in core-based licensing and support costs by reducing the number of cores needed to run their applications when migrating to a IBM Power server. The same can be said for companies running applications in AWS, Azure or Oracle public clouds, which sometimes charge by the thread. After analyzing database licenses, database maintenance, infrastructure, administrators, hardware and hardware maintenance costs, the numbers will show companies can run Oracle workloads on a IBM Power system for a third of the cost compared to running the same workload in the cloud.

IBM Power servers have achieved the best performance ratings for I/O intensive and memory demanding workloads, and have the highest ratings for security, scalability and reliability. Response times for analytics, in-memory database, ERP and cloud workloads are greatly affected by the Power9 system’s industry leading SMT capabilities, of which enterprise databases like Oracle and applications like SAP support.

IBM Power9 systems can execute 8 threads concurrently on a single core, and enable databases to execute multi-threading across all available cores, delivering a maximum of 192 simultaneous multithreads on a 24 core AIX server. IBM Power9 systems with AIX 7.2 support 1536 threads and 32 TB of RAM in a single VM. The new IBM Power9 Second Generation server models have PowerVM virtualization built-in, support 25 GB/sec high-speed interconnect for CAPI and OpenCAPI, and have PCI-Express 4.0 connectivity that delivers twice the I/O bandwidth of PCI-Express 3.0. If your workloads need even more power that the Power9 maximums, consider a IBM Power10 server running AIX 7.3, which can support 4.3x more throughput per core, 10x more users per node, and capable of delivering 5X faster AI inferencing per socket (2.7x more inferences per second).

Contact Midland for workload migration assessments or new Power System Upgrade configurations and pricing. The IBM Power9 server family consists of the following models:

9009-41G S914: 1 Socket, 8 core Max, 1TB RAM Max*
9009-41A S914: 1 Socket, 8 core Max, 1TB RAM Max
9009-22G S922: 1-2 Socket, 22 core Max, 4TB RAM Max*
9009-22A S922: 1-2 Socket, 20 core Max, 4TB RAM Max
9009-42G S924: 1-2 Socket, 24 core Max, 4TB RAM Max*
9009-42A S924: 1-2 Socket, 24 core Max, 4TB RAM Max
9223-22H H922: 1-2 Socket, 22 core Max, 4TB RAM Max
9223-24H H924: 2 Socket, 24 core Max, 4TB RAM Max
9040-MR9 E950: 2-4 Socket, 48 core Max, 16 TB RAM Max
9080-M9S E980: 1-4 Socket, 192 core Max, 64 TB RAM Max
*Second Generation Power9

Other price performance gains are due to a number of compounding factors that directly relate to the IBM Power9 system hardware and integrated architecture, including, on-chip accelerators, enhanced cache hierarchy, lower latency memory and higher bandwidth of the memory subsystem. The higher transactions per core a system can support, means less licenses are needed to support the workload. IBM Power9 servers include comprehensive RAS features with memory protection, memory mirroring, memory sparing, faulty memory de-allocation through Chipkill, and hot swappable memory modules to enable memory faults to be isolated and repaired without needing to take the system down.

Highest-rated reliability, availability and security for 12 straight years

Each Power9 core supports twice the workload size of an x86 server

Supports 3.2X more containers per core than tested x86 systems

Supports 33% more memory compared to x86 Xeon

ITIC has ranked IBM Power Systems 1st place in every major reliability (1.75 minutes of downtime a year on average “99.999% uptime”)

The IBM Power Server Total Cost of Ownership math is broken down by assessing your organization’s combined costs for all licenses, maintenance, support personnel and related infrastructure required to run ALL your applications being hosted on virtual servers over a three-year period. To complete the math, you must determine the number of workloads that each server can handle, which will determine the number of servers required by your application. This number shows the number of servers required for a given number of workloads. The equation you will need to use to assess your TCO is as follows:

IBM technological achievements are obviously a key reason for customer cost savings, of which are made available through the IBM’s AIX software bundles. IBM AIX software is extremely affordable if not downright cheap. It is also important to note, IBM adds new features and even enhance existing hardware capabilities through technology level (TL) updates that are provided to customers each year. As you can see, the IBM support life cycle is very long, so your organization will not likely have to plan for any unexpected costs associated with unsupported hardware, operating systems or database incompatibility issues. Below is a short summary AIX version feature history, starting with 7.1 that was first released in 2010 for the IBM Power6 server family and supports up to Power8 server mode. IBM continues support of AIX 7.1 with TL5 until April 30, 2023 when the 7.1 End of Life (EOL) or End of Support (EOS) or End of Service Pack Support (EoSPS) date is scheduled.

IBM AIX 7.1 Feature Summary for IBM Power Server Models P6, P7 and P8
(September 2010 – April 2023)
AIX binary compatibility with AIX 6
JFS2 Integrated Snapshots
WPAR storage devices
Role Based Access Control (RBAC)
Encrypting JFS file system
Trusted AIX and Trusted Execution
Cluster Aware AIX (CAA)
Snapshot of a JFS2 file system
TOPAS Multi-server
JFS to JFS2
Secure Shell (SSH) in base AIX
Active Memory Expansion
Transactional Memory
Shared Storage Pool support
PowerVC Support
Last release 7.1 TL5 - functionally stabilized since AIX 7.2 arrived. Mostly bug and security fixes ever since.

IBM AIX 7.2 Feature Summary for IBM Power Server Models P7, P8 and P9
(December 2015 – No date set yet)
AIX binary compatibility with AIX 7.1
Live (Kernel) Update capability for Technology Levels, Service Packs, and Fixes.
Active Memory Expansion 64k page
LVM thin storage block reclamation
AIX Open Source Toolbox Enhancements
SMB 2.1 client and SMB 3.0.2 client
Migration to Cloud ready - create_ova
Flash Cache For Fibre Channel disks
Includes Dynamic System Optimizer (DSO)
External Interrupt Virtualization Engine (XIVE)
Live Kernel Update LKU Enhancements
POWER9 HW NX GZIP engine
Ansible Paybooks
Scaling enhancements – larger LPARs
Simplified Remote Restart Supported
Application address space randomization
LVM passive mirror enhancements for concurrent I/O applications
NIM HTTP support for updates
Shared memory communications over RDMA (SMCR)
AIX installation from USB flash drive (also added to AIX 7.1 TL5)
Enhanced multi-queue NPIV performance
Fibre Channel: Congestion Notification, 32 Gb support, and NVMe over Fiber Channel
14 million open files per SRAD
NVMe drive space reclaim
GLVM HW assisted compression
OpenSSH with Power HW GZIP compression
OpenSSL version 3 via the AIX Web Download Pack
BSI and NIAP common criteria certifications for AIX 7.2 TL5

IBM AIX 7.3 Feature Summary for IBM Power Server Models P8, P9 and P10
(December 2021 – No date set yet)
AIX binary compatibility with AIX 7.2
Power10 server support:
Power10 support 240 cores & 1920 hardware threads per LPAR
Matrix Maths Accelerator (MMA)
OpenBLAS with MMA support, available from the AIX Toolbox
Optimized MEMCPY instructions
For new generation IBM OpenXL compilers
Stronger default password rules and new default password algorithm (SSHA-256)
Telnet & FTP not in default installation (due to security risks)
”Out of the box” ready for POWER or Power10 hardware NX GZIP with "PIGZ" and create_ova supported
New JFS2 file systems default to inline log
Added Open Source bash 5.1 and Python 3.9
AIX Open Source Toolbox that uses “DNF” & toolbox updated plus many extra packages
Fast Dynamic LPAR resize CPU and memory
Reduced LPAR boot times with large memory
LVM Encryption for ROOTVG
128 TB JFS2 file system and file size
Oracle 19c support
Virtual Persistent Memory (vPMem) can be configured as a hdisk
Live update of AIX kernel tunables (no, vmo)
New IPsec features (NAT-T, IKE fragmentation)
Stronger default security for AIX trace channel 0
Sendmail support for SASL authentication
TCP Cubic support
Increased fork and exec scaling
Enhanced Async IO IOPs scaling
NVME over fabrics with NPIV storage virtualization
Fabric Device Management Interface (FDMI) support
Install and boot from iSCSI attached storage
Physical volume encryption, including internal SED drives
OpenSSL version 3
AIX dump exploitation of Power hardware GZIP
Reduced alternate path fail-over times with 16 GB and faster fiber channel adapters
NFS client support for files larger than 32 TB
TAR command support for the PAX archive format

You can read more about the details of AIX release and support dates here: https://www.ibm.com/support/pages/aix-support-lifecycle-information