The Rise of Good Enough IT – Round 2!

, Dec 9, 2021

Back in November 2020 I wrote an article about the rise of ‘Good Enough IT’ (The Rise of ‘Good Enough’ IT) which looked at the effects the pandemic had taken on spending and planned architecture refreshes and the risks associated with doing nothing. 12 months on and what a year we have had! We all know about the pandemic, so I will just leave that there (but if anyone has a crystal ball to predict the future, please let me know!).

This year also introduced the Semiconductor shortage which has massively affected organisations’ ability to get hold of hardware; so some of the staying still is not at the organisation’s choice - it is something they cannot achieve. However, I still speak to companies on a regular basis that are choosing not to do anything even though the same list of challenges exist around:

  • Costs
  • Operational Risks
  • Security
  • Competitive Advantage

The problem is only magnified by the fact as an industry, the technology does not stand still; so with each new release of hardware, software, operating system, hypervisor etc., the challenges are enhanced.

Let’s take IBM Power for example, Power 10 launched back in September this year and the launch brought about some fantastic enhancements, most notably;

  • Power10 is the first IBM chip to use 7 nanometre (nm) technology. The new chip supports up to 240 cores in a single system and Power10 offers over a 50% lower carbon footprint for the same work compared to POWER8 and 33% carbon footprint improvement compared to POWER9.
  • Power 10 comes with a brand-new memory architecture, OMI (Open Memory Interface) which offers both improved reliability and throughput. The new memory also offers support for multi petabyte memory clusters which IBM states will improve cloud capacity and economics for memory-intensive workloads such as Oracle and SAP.
  • Security is a massive focus for every organisation and the new Power1o chip comes with enhanced encryption capabilities as they have quadrupled the number of encryption engines. This new enhancement means that the chip will now encrypt all data in main memory to provide an added layer of security and you can also encrypt data at rest but this does come with a small performance hit.
  • AI is another area of focus for organisations as they go on their digital transformation journeys and Power10 assists in this area as well. The new processor comes with an embedded matrix math accelerator which will enhance performance in some cases by as much as 20%.

All of these features address the problems that were highlighted 12 months ago; however I am still engaging with clients on Power 7, 8 and 9 that are simply not modernising and standing still. This is especially worrying as the murmurs of Power 11 are already circulating and as I said - technology does not stand still.

The other major point for me, especially around the Power Servers, is that they are the lifeblood of many of those businesses. It runs their critical software such as SAP and Oracle. It houses the mission critical databases. So why run the risk?

As with my article last year, the recommendation from me is to start to plan for the modernisation of these systems and the software that runs on them. You will probably find you save money and actually have peace of mind, as you are not running something that is unsupported. As always if you would like to talk about how IT transformation can support your Digital Transformation or just want to know how to start to address legacy systems, please get in touch with Logicalis.

Learn more about data management in our free eBook here and watch my recent fireside chat with IBM Power Systems CTO, David Spurway, where we discuss the exciting plans, IBM have for the coming years and how Logicalis can combine technologies together to give the customer a perfect solution.

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