First Distribution debuts secure and resilient IBM Power11, powering AI value
Sylvia Scheerova, Vice President of IBM Power Sales EMEA
IBM’s Power11 launch is one of the company’s most significant in recent years.
The new technology promises to improve customers’ productivity and reduce costs while paving the road to full artificial intelligence (AI) value.
IBM’s Power11 servers deliver the availability, resiliency, performance, and scalability modern enterprises demand for seamless hybrid deployment on-premises or in the IBM Cloud.
Power11 is designed to be the most resilient server in the history of the IBM Power platform, with 99,9999% of uptime.
Together with zero planned downtime for system maintenance and less than one minute guaranteed ransomware threat detection with IBM Power Cyber Vault, Power11 sets a new bar for business continuity – addressing both planned and cyber-incident-related downtime.
For the first time ever, the Power11 general availability will simultaneously include high-end, mid-range, and entry-level servers as well as IBM Power Virtual Servers in the IBM Cloud.
IBM Power Virtual Server offers a fast path to the cloud for power workloads, and is certified as a hyperscaler platform for RISE with SAP.
Power11 is also the first IBM Power server to support the IBM Spyre Accelerator – IBM’s system-on-a-chip that will be available in Q4 2025 and is purpose-built for today’s AI-intensive inference workloads.
With support for autonomous operations, Power11 delivers intelligent performance gains that reduce complexity and improve workload efficiency.
Power11 offers up to 55% better core performance compared to Power9 and has up to 45% more capacity – with higher core counts in entry and mid-range systems compared to Power10.
This upgraded performance means that with Power11, enterprises are positioned to achieve enhanced flexibility and security, enabling them to transform their enterprise processes through automation.
With Power11, customers can expect:
- Zero planned downtime for system maintenance.
- Less than one minute ransomware threat detection with IBM Power Cyber Vault.
- Transformed business processes with AI integration.
- Efficient IT that saves time and money.
Sylvia Scheerova, VP of IBM Power sales for the EMEA region, explained that the new Power11 will help customers to reap the benefits of autonomous computing in the AI era.
She points out that IBM always aims to integrate the full stack in any new technology – “so there is integration all the way horizontally as well as vertically.”
This means the full stack of hybrid cloud platform operating systems and firmware, computing hardware, and silicon technology is tightly operated – and these are all built on a solid foundation of performance, availability, and security.
A key innovation in Power11 is zero downtime, which Scheerova explained is critically important for mission-critical workloads.
Security is another major innovation, with Power11 guaranteeing one-minute ransomware detection with automated response and recovery within minutes.
Vastly improved performance drives a 5-times increase in business process rate, as does AI integration into existing enterprise workflows.
Autonomy is key to operating in the AI era, so the Power11 portfolio includes the following:
- A new energy-efficient operating model that optimises power consumption without compromising service level agreements (SLAs).
- New 2.5D integrated stacked capacitor and innovative thermal technologies to optimise power consumption.
- Improved performance through workload isolation with Resource Groups.
- Next-generation memory with 3-time DDR bandwidth delivering performance to larger, memory-intensive applications.
- New off-chip acceleration based on IBM Spyre planned for the fourth quarter of 2025.
The technology is also secure by design, with quantum-enabled IT guarding against cyber incidents and guaranteeing ransomware detection within one minute, and automated response and recovery within minutes.
Scheerova said that IBM Power11 closes the operational efficiency gap, thereby improving business processes for customers.
The true value of Power11 also lies in its extreme automation, reduced costs, and optimised workloads, she said.
With Power11, customers can scale AI across the enterprise, boost productivity with assistants and agents, and unlock enterprise data with data fabric and platforms.
IBM Power is one of the most open systems available today, Scheerova added, so customers have a choice about what they want to implement.
At the end of the day, customers are looking to improve their bottom line – and IBM Power11 allows them to do so by reducing costs and improving productivity.
Raising the security bar
David-Chancellor Maddison, Cyber Practice Program Leader for EMEA at IBM
With cybersecurity one of the most pressing challenges facing companies, reseller partners should be mapping protection features to the threats that hang over their customers.
This is according to David-Chancellor Maddison, Cyber Practice Program Leader for EMEA at IBM.
The first stop is identity verification – and Power11 layers multi-factor authentication with two-person integrity.
It also includes ransomware detection, where every IO is tested, while applications are scanned with additional enhanced app scanning.
To mitigate data theft, Power11 offers Quantum Safe, which encrypts data at rest and offers key management via GKL.
Since most infiltration takes place while data is moving, Power 22 Quantum Safe also protects data in transit.
For recovery, the Power11 Clean Room is a secure environment where data is scanned and mounted. It provides enhanced vault scanning so organisations have a golden copy that is immutable.
Speed of recovery is paramount, so the clean room provides data availability within less than 60 seconds.
IT organisations can spin up a number of clean rooms, creating multiple sources of clean data – and since the clean room is on the primary source, it can be restored within seconds.
“There is no other combination of technology that can do all of that,” Maddison said.
Resilience enables business continuity
Ashwin Srinivas, Lead Applied AI and Hybrid Cloud Offerings at IBM.
Ashwin Srinivas, Senior Product Manager for AI at IBM Power, said IBM Power11 aims to ensure cyber resilience, protection, and security by design to protect its enterprise clients.
IBM Power11 servers are designed with advanced security features, including quantum-safe cryptography, to protect against future threats.
They are built for resilience with the capability to offer zero-downtime maintenance and rapid ransomware threat detection.
Power11 implements the Quantum-Safe Secure Boot process that uses quantum-resistant algorithms for digital signatures, ensuring the integrity of the entire software stack – from firmware to operating system – against emerging quantum-era threats.
Hardware Memory Tagging protects against vulnerabilities like buffer overflows and side-channel exploits by validating any buffer access, safeguarding system integrity.
With IBM Power Cyber Vault, Power11 offers guaranteed ransomware threat detection in less than one minute, contributing to overall business continuity.
And the servers are built with features like memory encryption and automated key lifecycle management to enhance system integrity and data protection, and are designed to protect against “harvest-now, decrypt-later” attacks.
IBM Concert ensures zero downtime
Ronnie Moodley, Global Principal Sales Leader of Power at IBM, stressed that one of the core focuses around the Power11 launch has been eliminating business disruption with zero downtime.
Planned downtime is a major cost for IT organisations, he added, with the annual average cost coming in at $5.6 million.
A system that offers zero planned downtime means these costs are eliminated.
IBM Concert is an application-centric resilience hub that unifies siloed data across cost, runtime, incident, and release tools.
Customers can proactively manage their security to reduce the time spent on CVE mitigation by 90%.
Using AI, Concert uncovers crucial insights about operations and provides application-specific recommendations for improvement.
Apart from AI-driven recommendations and remediation tips, it offers automated data analysis from disparate systems and tools, plus insights and remediation recommendations that lead to a lower mean time to resolution.
Concert lets IT teams be more proactive about application health and security by identifying operational issues before they escalate, leading to higher application uptime and lower risk.
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