Blake Hoskinson
Solutions Engineering Manager for IBM Power
At IBM’s See What’s Next Level virtual and live events on July 8, the company unveiled its next-generation Power11 servers. This article kicks off a series exploring the platform’s innovations in depth. To start, here’s a high-level overview of IBM Power11 standout features and what they mean for enterprise IT.
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Autonomous IT: Built for the AI Era
Power11 marks the beginning of a new generation of infrastructure designed with autonomy and AI at its core. It introduces a new set of capabilities that come from a full-stack integration and innovation unparalleled in the distributed computing market.
Businesses can expect significant and unmatched benefits, such as zero maintenance downtime, minutes to detect and recover from ransomware attacks, and more than 25X increase in business process throughput leveraging new AI acceleration technologies to support even more mission-critical, complex business process transformations.
With Power11, IBM is embedding automation across the entire IT lifecycle—from provisioning to ongoing operations.
This includes:
- Infrastructure-as-Code with Terraform
- Application Configuration Management via Red Hat Ansible
- Enhancements to Hardware Management Console and Cloud Management Console
- Integrating watsonx and new tools like IBM Concert to create intelligent, AI-infused workflows that streamline operations and decision-making.
Resiliency and Security Built-In
IBM has bolstered the resiliency, availability and security of Power Systems with new features and capabilities of Power11:
- 99.9999% Availability and Zero Planned Downtime
Power servers are renowned for their reliability and Power11 pushes that envelope further with an astonishing 99.9999% of availability. Furthermore, planned outages for system maintenance can be eliminated with Zero Planned Downtime with Automated Platform Maintenance. - AI-driven Support
Resolve IBM Support tickets faster with Automated First Failure Data Capture (FFDC) and AI enhanced IBM support process. Power11 offers a single user interface to open a ticket, collect logs, and send them to IBM support. On receiving the files, IBM support uses AI-enhanced processes to diagnose the issue and provide a resolution, making case turnaround faster than ever before. - Quantum Safe Cryptography
Power11 integrates quantum safe cryptography into its management, hardware, and virtualization stacks, keeping your systems and data safe from this emerging threat. Additionally, PowerSC now offers a one click cryptographic inventory discovery with risk prioritization. - IBM Power Cyber Vault – Detect Threats in Under a Minute
IBM Power Cyber Vault is a unified cyber resilient solution of Power11, storage, software, and expert labs services to respond to evolving cyber threats and regulatory standards. The combination can detect threats in under a minute and return systems to operation in hours.
Hybrid Cloud
Power11 is available on day one in PowerVS offering a hybrid cloud experience with consistency between on-premises and cloud deployments. Since the hardware and OS are consistent across environments, there is no need for re-platforming. Organizations’ IBM i, AIX, Linux, and Red Hat OpenShift workloads can run on-prem or in PowerVS and seamlessly move between the two.
For businesses that want the flexibility of PowerVS but need the control of an on-premises environment, PowerVS Private Cloud is an option. In this model, the infrastructure for a PowerVS environment is deployed in a customer data center but managed by IBM as Infrastructure-as-a-Service, the same as PowerVS.
Another option for pay-per-use on-prem computing is Power Enterprise Pools 2.0. In this model, the customer owns and manages the infrastructure, but memory and processor capacity are billed as consumed. Power11 offers a simplified processor and memory activation structure to streamline configuration, deployment and use of Enterprise Pools. Further, IBM has released a Statement of Direction to offer hybrid consumption via PEP 2.0 and PowerVS integration in a single Enterprise Savings Plan.
AI Acceleration
IBM Power11 enables you to integrate and scale enterprise-grade AI across your business workflows, driving transformation and unlocking new levels of productivity and insight.
IBM Power11 offers a compelling Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), especially for organizations working with large language models and other complex AI workloads. With next-gen Matrix Math Assist (MMA) built into the processor, it’s already a capable inferencing engine.
Coming in Q4 2025, Spyre AI accelerator cards will push performance even further:
- 300+ TOPS per 75W card
- 32 cores and 128GB LPDDR5 memory per card
- Up to 2 drawers per system, each with 8 cards (256 AI-optimized cores)
This setup delivers up to 10x the performance of Power10’s on-chip MMA acceleration.
Energy Efficiency
Power11 continues IBM’s tradition of improving energy efficiency:
- 33% better performance per watt vs. Power10
- 2x better performance per watt vs. x86 systems
A new Energy Efficient Mode reduces power usage by up to 30% with only a 10% performance tradeoff. Automated scheduling allows systems to shift modes at scheduled times – like a programmable thermostat.
System consolidation also plays a role. Migrating from Power9 to Power11 typically yields a 3:1 consolidation ratio, cutting energy use by around 60%.
Performance & IT Efficiency
Power11 performance improvements vary by model, but here’s what you can generally expect:
- 1.75x to 5x system-level performance boost over Power9
- 11% to 46% improvement over Power10 at the system level
- 27% to 39% per-core performance gain vs. Power9
- 1% to 22% per-core improvement vs. Power10
While per-core gains are more modest, the overall system improvements are driven by enhancements across the board—including faster bus speeds, increased memory bandwidth, and software-level improvements.
One of those software improvements is processor Resource Groups that provide isolation for assigned cores to partitions assigned to the group. The use of Resource Groups can result in significant performance improvements by:
- Physically isolating assigned cores to specific partitions
- Reducing noisy neighbor effects by grouping and isolating workloads
- Improving efficiency through hypervisor-level dispatching optimizations
- Preventing affinity issues caused by off-node virtual processor dispatches
Performance & IT Efficiency
The entire Power11 family will be available starting July 25 except for the S1112 (available 2026). This includes the E1180, E1150, S1124, and S1122 servers.
The systems have many of the same physical characteristics as the comparable Power10 models but with increased core counts, processor frequency, and memory bandwidth. The table below provides a high-level overview of the models.
For customers looking to upgrade their Power10 systems, Serial Number Upgrades are available for E1180 and E1150 (coming in 4Q25) systems.
In Summary
IBM Power11 represents a bold leap forward in enterprise computing. With its blend of performance, AI acceleration, energy efficiency, and hybrid flexibility, it’s designed to meet the demands of modern IT—today and tomorrow.
Stay tuned for upcoming articles where we’ll dive deeper into each of these innovations.
More Information
Pellera’s (formerly Mainline) team of Power Systems experts is here to help you navigate what IBM Power11 means for your organization. Whether you’re evaluating your current infrastructure, exploring licensing changes, or planning for future workloads that demand AI acceleration and hybrid cloud readiness, we can guide you through every step. Reach out to your Pellera Account Executive directly or contact us to start the conversation.
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