72 Red Hat OpenShift and IBM Cloud Paks on IBM Power Systems: Volume 1
5.1  IBM Power Systems
Over the years, the IBM Power Systems family grew, matured, was innovated, and pushed the 
boundaries of what clients expect and demand from the harmony of hardware and software.
With the advent of the IBM POWER4 processor in 2001, IBM introduced logical partitions 
(LPARs) outside of their mainframe family to another audience. What was seen as radical 
then, grew into the expected today. The term virtualization is now common-place across 
most platforms and operating systems. These days, virtualization is the core foundation for 
cloud computing.
IBM Power Systems is built for the most demanding, data-intensive, computing on Earth. The 
servers are cloud-ready and help you unleash insight from your data pipeline: from managing 
mission-critical data, to managing your operational data stores and data lakes, to delivering 
the best server for cognitive computing.
IBM POWER9, the foundation for the number 1 and number 2 supercomputers in the world, is 
the only processor with state-of-the-art I/O subsystem technology, including next generation 
NVIDIA NVLink, PCIe Gen4, and IBM OpenCAPI™.
IBM POWER9 processor-based servers can be found in three product families: Enterprise 
servers, Scale-out servers, and Accelerated servers. Each of these three families is 
positioned for different types of client requirements and expectations.
IBM Power Systems servers that are based on IBM POWER9 processors are built for today’s 
most advanced applications from mission-critical enterprise workloads to big data and AI, as 
shown in Figure 5-1.
Figure 5-1   IBM Power Systems
/SM590000Mission critical
Robust scale-out and enterprise servers can support a wide range of mission-critical 
applications that are running on IBM AIX, IBM i, and Linux operating systems. They also 
can provide building blocks for private and hybrid cloud environments.
/SM590000Big data
Scale-out servers deliver the performance and capacity that is required for big data and 
analytics workloads.
/SM590000Enterprise AI
Servers provide intelligent, accelerated infrastructure for modern analytics, HPC, and AI 
workloads. They are advanced enterprise servers that deliver fast machine learning 
performance.