IBM Power and the Cloud Questions CIOs Can’t Ignore

Are you looking for ways to modernize your IBM Power environment without starting over? Do you want the freedom to choose the right platform - Power9, Power10, or Power11 - while scaling usage up or down to match your budget?

That is exactly where IBM Power Virtual Server (PowerVS) comes in.

Today’s IT leaders are balancing familiar challenges: tight budgets, rising AI demands, and pressure to innovate. Hardware refresh cycles that once unfolded over years now collide with business units demanding new capacity in weeks. AI has shifted from experimental to urgent, and many teams need options that go beyond a single infrastructure model.

There is a practical way forward - cloud-based flexibility without sacrificing the reliability and performance you already trust from IBM Power.

More Options for How You Run Power

Your IBM Power systems remain the backbone of mission-critical workloads. PowerVS simply gives you another way to run them- on hardware, in the cloud, or a mix of both - depending on what the moment demands.

Even strong on-prem setups hit limits. PowerVS fills the gaps:

If you’ve ever wished your Power environment could do more, this is what PowerVS brings to the table:

• The flexibility to choose Power9, Power10, or Power11 for the right workload.
• A cost model that follows your actual consumption.
• The comfort of staying inside the IBM ecosystem your team already knows.

It is not a rebuild. It is the same Power environment, delivered with the economics and elasticity of cloud.

When a Refresh Isn’t the Only Option

A financial services firm running IBM i workloads faced end-of-support on aging hardware. Instead of rushing into a full refresh, the IT team paused to weigh its options: invest heavily in new hardware immediately or look for a more flexible path forward. At the same time, their analytics group wanted to explore new AI models but could not risk experimenting in production.

PowerVS gave them another option. By shifting selected workloads into IBM Cloud, they gained an isolated environment for model training and testing while keeping regulated systems on trusted Power11 hardware. The result was breathing room to innovate - without compliance risk, downtime, or overspending. For the financial services team, it wasn’t about abandoning hardware. It was about keeping choice and control in their hands.

Where Should Your Workloads Really Live?

Most organizations no longer see the decision as cloud versus on-premises. The smarter question is: what belongs where?

With PowerVS, you can:

• Keep sensitive systems on-premises for governance and compliance
• Use IBM Cloud for rapid prototyping and AI development
• Scale inference workloads in the cloud to serve users across regions

For AI specifically, PowerVS provides the flexibility that fixed infrastructure cannot. Training workloads often spike unpredictably, while inference requires real-time responsiveness. PowerVS lets you burst capacity when needed, then scale it back down, so you are never paying for idle resources.

Adding Cloud Without Starting Over

For many IT leaders, the priority is not replacing what works - it’s extending it. PowerVS gives you a way to bring cloud flexibility to your IBM Power environment without disrupting applications, processes, or staff.

With PowerVS, you can:

• Modernize your environment without re-platforming or retraining teams
• Explore AI workloads - like fraud detection, predictive maintenance, or customer insights - on a flexible cloud platform
• Adopt hybrid models at your own pace, keeping proven systems in place while testing new ones in the cloud

PowerVS does not replace the hardware you already rely on - it works alongside it. Critical systems can stay on the servers built for them, while the cloud gives you extra capacity when you need flexibility or room to experiment. It is not about choosing one over the other. It is about having both, so you can adapt as priorities shift.

Final Thought

Your IBM Power strategy does not have to be all-or-nothing. With PowerVS, you can run workloads on Power9, Power10, or Power11, scale instantly, and align costs with usage. Why overbuild for rare peaks when you can dial capacity up or down on demand?

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