Why use PowerVS on IBM Cloud?
IBM Power is available on IBM Cloud alongside x86 and mainframes. It provides a secure platform used by the top 10 banks. Secure and performant, Power is based on RISC architecture (as opposed to CISC in Intel X86) and is designed specifically for high performance computing. IBM Power's hypervisor is part of the system firmware, rather than a software, which make it even more performant. Moreover, IBM Power systems can accelerate AI training and inferencing with its built-in Matrix Math Accelerators (MMA) without requiring external accelerators, such as GPUs, for executing statistical machine learning and inferencing (scoring) workloads. Power10 also offers memory sharing among Power Servers to handle AI models at scale.
PowerVS is available across 10 IBM Cloud multi-zone regions across Americas, Europe and APAC with the possibility to install Linux or AIX or IBMi on it. Moreover, PowerVS is certified to run Oracle (on AIX) and SAP HANA (on Linux) and offers cost savings on licenses due to its processor sharing and its processors performance (performance at least twice that of Intel processors per core).
Compliance to industry standards
Besides its SOC and ISO and PCI-DSS compliance certifications, PowerVS is compliant and validated to the IBM Cloud Framework for Financial Services control requirements.
The control requirements reflect the worldwide financial regulations and are pre-built in the IBM Cloud services. In addition, clients can use these control requirements on their regulated workload and verify compliance posture by running the IBM Cloud Framework for Financial Services profile available in the IBM Security and Compliance Center.
Deployable Architecture
Deployable Architectures are predefined, compliant-by-default architectures and control libraries that can be customised by clients and help them quickly deploy reference architectures on IBM Cloud. PowerVS and PowerVS for SAP HANA are both available as Deployable Architectures.
Deployable Architectures include shift-left security and compliance scans via an integrated DevSecOps model. The code is continuously scanned via IBM Security and Compliance Center with drifts flagged and remediations suggested.
Compliance Posture and threat/vulnerability scanning
IBM provides a service called IBM Cloud Security and Compliance Center Workload Protection to scan multi-cloud environments. PowerVS whether on prem or on IBM Cloud can be scanned for compliance policies such as Digital Operational Resilience (DORA) or NIS2 or PCI-DSS. The tool not only uncovers all non-compliant resources but also offers remediation for users.
In the same tool, clients can detect, in real-time, threats and vulnerabilities of resources, including PowerVS instances. Details can go granular to see where the vulnerability is located or who and when and where an event happened. In addition to the dashboard, clients can download reports and integrate with SIEM (Security Information and Event Management) and other notification tools such as Slack and ServiceNow.
Conclusion
PowerVS is the client choice for performance, security, AI, TCO, data center footprint. It is co-located in IBM Cloud across regionsand is validated on the IBM Cloud Framework for Financial Services. PowerVS can be deployed using Deployable Architectures in IBM Cloud Catalogue and can be continuously monitored for compliance and threats and vulnerabilities.