When you look at today’s fast-food ads, you often see the word “value.” This usually means a lower cost for an item or for a bundle of items. Ads like these may give the impression that “value” is the same as “cost.” However, “value” does not have the same meaning. Let’s look a little deeper at the broader meaning of “value” and how that relates to a discussion of technology.
Consider your values… e.g., things that are important to you. For example, when buying an appliance, cost is certainly a consideration, but you may be willing to pay a higher amount for a better warranty, a differentiating feature that other models may not have, experience of a brand’s reliability, or the recommendation of friends and influencers. You may also put value on a brand’s impact on your personal interests, such as the place you live and work, the country you live in, the planet you live on, or your belief system. All these things define what is “valuable” to you.
So, where am I going with this? Let’s talk about business computing: more specifically, how to use technology to help run your business. Computer technology has certainly exploded over the past 45 years since the advent of personal computers and the morphing of personal computing technology into its use in serving business applications. Before personal computers, business computing was something done by specialists providing computing technology in a “private cloud” approach… someone else (internally or externally) provided the technology and you just connected to it through a terminal to get your work done.
As more businesses adopted small computers and businesses grew (more sales, more products/services or both), more computers were needed. Small systems would tend to scale horizontally (e.g., more machines) as more services were added or as additional growth required more systems. This has led to very expensive server sprawl, resulting in today’s explosive growth of large co-location data centers to locate all those horizontally-growing servers on behalf of multiple customers. Sounds like a 1950’s drive-in horror movie, doesn’t it?
These data centers consume large amounts of power, water, and real estate. Municipal services (such as electrical generation/delivery, water access, land development/access) have been impacted by this growth, and some communities are starting to fight back against the impact/cost of that growth.
So, can we do things smarter to reduce consumption of resources while still providing the technology that we want as consumers of that technology? Very simply, yes: but only if we consider and value more than short-term thinking, short-term spending and short-term consequences.
Small computers are inherently inefficient for running multiple workloads with heavy-duty I/O and networking. Why not consider running your business applications on something that can do more with less? Why not use a platform that can share the computing power up to full processor capacity, take less floorspace, less cooling, and less power? If you have a Linux-based business application environment, you have available technology today that can reduce your CPU requirements by a factor of 12 or more (12 small system processors to 1 processor of an IBM LinuxOne system), which can also reduce your per-core software licensing costs.
An IBM LinuxOne system has a multitude of specialty processing engines in addition to your “CPU” to do behind-the-scenes work such as data sorting, data compression, I/O to and from storage and networks, superior memory management, quantum-safe cryptography and generative/inferential AI. IBM LinuxOne is a completely redundant environment, providing 99.999999% up time (that equates to less than ½ second per year of potential downtime). IBM LinuxOne was designed with security from the start, having the highest Common Criteria rating in the industry.
With an IBM LinuxOne system, you can reduce your power consumption by up to 83%, reduce your floorspace requirements due to fewer but larger systems that are designed to share components like memory, networking, Artificial Intelligence and quantum-safe cryptography. IBM LinuxOne runs Linux operating systems from all major distributors (RedHat, SuSE, Canonical) and from other sources (AlmaLinux, openSUSE, or build-your-own from source). You could even potentially port Microsoft .NET applications to IBM LinuxOne.
If this sounds interesting, please contact LRS and let’s see if an IBM LinuxOne system will meet your “values” for the long-term good of your business and your community.