We are in unprecedented times. How companies and individuals respond will determine who will shape the future at the other end of this pandemic.
Many pundits have said that computing infrastructure does not matter. Run everything on x86 chips. However, the x86 environment has a significant flaw when it comes to handling a surge in demand like our health care providers are facing today. With x86, what you buy in terms of processor and memory resources is what you have. You cannot surge without buying more equipment. It would be nice if a hospital needs more processor or memory capacity to run its patient care applications to instantly turn on that capacity to satisfy demand.
IBM’s POWER technology allows the mid-range and high-end POWER servers to provide processor and memory resources in an on-demand fashion to satisfy that surge. Those servers can be purchased with additional processors and memory physically in the system, turned off and not paid for until there is a surge in demand. That surge can be met instantly for periods ranging from hours to permanent.
As a show of how IBM is responding to this pandemic and supporting health care organizations utilizing these mid-range and high-end POWER servers, IBM is allowing those organization to utilize all those processor and memory resources at no charge for 30 days. This will allow a hospital to increase its compute capacity to be able to handle more patients and more health care workers instantly without incurring a charge. That is how a world class company responds in this time of need.
Ed Turetzky is a Senior Infralytics Architect for Flagship Solutions Group.
About Flagship
Flagship provides IBM solutions, managed services, and cloud solutions worldwide. These include data center strategic planning and hybrid cloud implementations based on a wide range of assessments that look at virtualization, server consolidation, security, and infrastructure-focused integration. Flagship’s managed services include cloud-based server monitoring and management, 24×7 helpdesk support, and data center infrastructure management.