Ever since IBM Cloud announced plans to broadly adopt 4th Gen Intel® Xeon® processors across our cloud server environments to help customers drive better business outcomes for workloads like AI and HPC, our development and product management teams have been busy bringing those blueprints to life inside our bare metal and virtual server portfolios. Ensuring our on-premises compute strategy stays up to date with today’s latest vCPU and CPU technology is paramount down here at the bottom of the stack. That’s why we’re thrilled to go over the latest essential releases for 4th Gen Intel® Xeon® on both IBM Cloud classic infrastructure and IBM Cloud VPC in today’s IBM Cloud Community post.
Certified for SAP HANA and SAP NetWeaver: IBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers for classic infrastructure
4th Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors are one of the most purpose-built CPUs on the market today with several built-in accelerators designed to improve performance in AI, data analytics, networking, storage, and HPC. And as customers scale their workloads from pilot and dev and test to production – they can now do so over more IBM Cloud Data Centers, globally. With IBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers (classic), customers can now provision their 4th Gen Intel® Xeon®-based servers across all key IBM Cloud Multizone Regions (MZRs) and Single Zone Regions (SZRs). That’s right. We’re officially rolled out around the world. You can check out the full IBM Cloud Data Center map here. In addition to expanding our 4th Gen Intel® Xeon® availability footprint, we’ve also introduced more dual-processor configurations, more storage options, and more OS options to better suite HPC, Oracle, MYSQL, and notably SAP HANA workloads for both OLAP and OLTP and VMware workloads with the addition of VMware ESXi v7 and v8. IBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers on classic with 4th Gen Intel® Xeon® processors also deliver the newest Intel® SGX® Confidential Computing enclaves, which are designed for the highest level of application isolation inside our Intel x86 bare metal server portfolio.
Certified for SAP NetWeaver: IBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers for VPC with 4th Gen Intel® Xeon® processors
The newest selection profiles (21 in total) on 4th Gen Intel® Xeon® processors for IBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers for VPC are now certified to run SAP NetWeaver. These profiles include more core-to-memory ratios and dynamic network bandwidth exclusive to IBM Cloud VPC. We've also recently expanded into the IBM Cloud Frankfurt MZR with plans to roll out into more regions in the coming new year.
IBM Cloud Virtual Servers for VPC
IBM Cloud Virtual Servers for VPC with 4th Gen Intel® Xeon® processors are now certified to run SAP HANA environments through “Very High Memory” profiles. These 15 new profiles have a vCPU:RAM ratio of 1:16 and offer significant cost advantages over the previous 2nd Gen Intel® Xeon® processors in the same “Very High Memory” profile family. The team built these out specifically for running SAP HANA and SAP NetWeaver database workloads because of the very high core-to-ram ratio. As a result, these new profiles are also ideal for developers who struggle to create highly performant cloud-native services that require rapid access to large volumes of data. With 4th Gen Intel Xeon on “Very High Memory” profiles, customers can get rapid and elastic deployment of virtual server instances in a virtual private cloud with up to 3TB of memory for open source in-memory data services, like Memcached, MemSQL, or Redis. This initial release is currently available in the IBM Cloud Toronto MZR, with additional locations, including Dallas, Texas, coming within the new year.
Additionally, we've added Intel® Software Guard Extensions (Intel SGX) to our virtual servers to help protect data in use by isolating applications in secure enclaves. Customers can also try the Beta version of Intel® Trusted Domain Extensions (Intel TDX) – a new confidential computing path for our clients that’s designed to help keep data secure and tamper-resistant from both internal and external forces at all data stages . Together, they’re designed by Intel® to bring simpler, automated data protection for virtualized systems with as few as one click during instance configuration.
IBM Cloud Virtual Servers for VPC with 4th Gen Intel® Xeon® processors can now be provisioned and deployed across all IBM Cloud MZRs, including Dallas, Frankfurt, Washington, D.C., Toronto, Madrid, London, Sydney, Tokyo, Osaka, and Sao Paulo.
Getting started
Visit our product, documentation, and provisioning pages to learn more about IBM Cloud servers, or to see pricing and save a quote.
· IBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers (classic):
· IBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers for VPC:
· IBM Cloud Virtual Servers for VPC:
Get USD 1,000 in IBM Cloud credits
If you’re curious about deploying your first workload on IBM Cloud VPC, or you’re an existing customer looking to provision new workloads, then be sure to use our limited time promotion for IBM Cloud VPC. Get USD 1,000 in credits to use toward your new VPC resources—including compute, network and storage components with promo code VPC1000 inside bare metal or virtual server catalogs. This is a limited time promotion, is only available with 2nd Gen Intel Xeon-based profiles and other previous generation profiles.