Introduction

Effective December 8, 2025, IBM Power Virtual Server (PowerVS) is introducing Virtual Persistent Memory (vPMEM) as a generally available feature. This new capability brings persistent memory to the cloud, enabling significantly faster VM restarts and enhanced availability for mission-critical workloads such as SAP HANA — without any need for additional hardware investment.

What is vPMEM?

vPMEM is an IBM PowerVM  enhancement that allows carving out persistent memory volumes from existing DRAM on Power10 and newer systems on cloud. Unlike traditional volatile memory, these volumes retain data across VM restarts, drastically reducing downtime during planned maintenance.

• Supported environments: PowerVS Public and Private
• Underlying technology: DRAM-based persistence managed by PowerVM hypervisor
• Key operations: Attach/detach vPMEM volumes via APIs or GUI during VM creation or shutdown

Customer Value for SAP HANA Workloads

SAP HANA’s performance and availability depend heavily on in-memory operations. Restart times during maintenance can disrupt business continuity, and vPMEM directly addresses this challenge:

• 9×–16× Faster Restarts: Warm restarts shrink from hours to minutes, reducing maintenance windows dramatically.
• Zero Extra Cost for SAP Profiles: vPMEM is embedded in SAP-certified T-shirt profiles with predictable pricing.
• No Hardware Complexity: Unlike Intel Optane or physical PMEM, vPMEM uses existing DRAM—no additional hardware required which leads to lower TCO.
• Cloud-Native Flexibility: Configure vPMEM ratio (10–90%) within SAP-certified profiles.
• Enterprise Reliability: Supports Live Partition Mobility (LPM) and remote restart for resilience.
• Lower TCO: Eliminates standby node requirement for large systems (up to 12 TB), saving infrastructure costs.
• Industry-Leading SLA: 99.995% uptime translates to ~26 minutes max downtime per year.

Bottom line: For SAP HANA on PowerVS, vPMEM provides industry-leading agility, cost savings, and operational resilience.

Using vPMEM, an SAP HANA warm start is 9 times faster than the equivalent cold start for a 2.2 TB SAP HANA database. This factor increases to 16 for a 16 TB SAP HANA database. The above chart shows the linear dependency between SAP HANA startup times measured in minutes and the database size specified in TB.

Refer to VPMEM SAP HANA Whitepaper V2.2

Competitive Landscape

• x86: Depend on large DRAM instances or physical PMEM (Intel Optane), adding cost and complexity.
• IBM PowerVS: Delivers persistent memory benefits without hardware investment, integrated into SAP-certified profiles, and at zero incremental cost.
  This makes IBM’s approach unique in the market for SAP HANA IaaS.

Beyond SAP – Other Workloads

While SAP HANA is the primary beneficiary, vPMEM also supports:

• Non-SAP/AIX workloads: Faster restart times for applications sensitive to downtime.
• Linux-based enterprise apps: Improved availability during patching or planned maintenance.
  
• For non-SAP workloads, vPMEM is billed separately at the same granularity and price as standard memory.

Measured Benefits

IBM testing confirms:

• Warm start vs cold start: Up to 16× faster for large SAP HANA databases (16 TB).
• Operational impact: Maintenance windows reduced from hours to minutes, enabling near-continuous availability.

Getting Started

• vPMEM is available on PowerVS Public and Private environments starting December 8, 2025.
• For SAP HANA certified profiles, vPMEM is included at no extra cost.
• For non-SAP workloads, vPMEM is billed separately.
• Documentation: IBM Cloud Docs