IBM Power Systems Help Manage Big Data Needs

by Darryl K. Taft

French cloud service provider OVH was looking to provide a public cloud service that could meet the needs of its 700,000 clients worldwide. OVH turned to IBM Power Systems for the release of its new cloud service, RunAbove, which is designed to allow developers access to high-performance hardware for their big data and analytics workloads in a public cloud environment. The initial results of POWER8, based on real use cases of analytics workloads performed by OVH, show multiple times improved performance over analytical queries running on x86-based commodity servers.

IBM’s new approach to supercomputing includes new Elastic Storage and Platform Computing software along with Power Systems servers. The U.S. Department of Energy recently awarded IBM, Nvidia and Mellanox contracts valued at $325 million to develop and deliver the world’s most advanced data-centric supercomputing systems at the Lawrence Livermore and Oak Ridge National Laboratories, helping them advance innovation and discovery in science, engineering and national defense.

IBM Power Systems provide the infrastructure behind IBM’s Watson cognitive system, which is now driving new consumer and enterprise services and applications in industries such as retail, health care, financial services and education. These systems are able to analyze data and unlock insights in a matter of minutes, rather than the days it takes traditional analytics systems to complete such tasks.

With IBM AIX and Linux on Power Systems and Elastic Storage technology, all four Grand Slam tennis tournaments—the U.S. Open, the French Open, Wimbledon and the Australian Open—are able to deliver real-time information from analytics, cloud computing, mobile devices and social media instantaneously to millions of online fans and broadcasters around the world. The IBM SlamTracker, for example, analyzes more than 41 million data points from eight years of Grand Slam tennis match data to identify three performance indicators—dubbed “Keys to the Match”—that can affect a player’s ability to succeed. During a match, SlamTracker visualizes the real-time data, including serve statistics and winning shots, allowing fans to interact with the data to gain deeper insight into match dynamics.

German insulation and paint manufacturer Sto SE & Co. KGaA manages formulas for more than 11 million paint colors. With over 5 million customer orders a year, Sto turned to IBM Power Systems to meet its growing data management needs for its portfolio of paints, plasters, renders/stuccos and insulation systems. The new solution is already paying off, with customer response times falling by 50 percent and availability increasing to 24/7. The company is also using Power to manage and store the swells of data that its 4,700 employees around the globe are generating.

To tap the growth potential in retail banking in Asia, Saigon-Hanoi Bank had been expanding rapidly, growing to 5,000 employees across 317 branches. To support the growth, SHB turned to IBM systems products to provide the bank with a single view of clients and data, enabling it to streamline its IT infrastructure management and consolidate data flow. By automating several pieces of the financial process, the bank was able to launch new online and mobile-based services for customers, such as loan application, appointment booking and bill payment options.

U.S. department store Bon-Ton needed to get a step ahead of its customers by providing them with what they wanted before they even set foot in the store. But its employees were drowning in spreadsheets, trying to make sense of the data buried in transactions. With IBM Power Systems running Linux, Bon-Ton was able to glean insights from this wealth of information, allowing it to support 2.5 times more online orders during the holiday season as compared with its prior x86 environment. The new systems also helped control costs, boost capacity and improve efficiency.