Are you looking for ways to gain speed, agility and a competitive edge? In a world where competition is rapidly growing and margins are getting slimmer, organizations need to use their data to gain insights and keep their competitive edge. The explosion in today’s application market is almost exclusively around applications that deliver information from masses of data to countless numbers of end users devices. Therefore, in order to deal effectively with this deluge of data, organizations need extra performance from their systems.

Performance for demanding application workloads

The standard for building the systems that have the performance required for demanding application workloads is the LAMP stack. LAMP stands for Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP and has been a quick and easy web service solution stack that Linux developers have relied on for many years. As a free operating system, the developer market initially embraced Linux because it let them download, modify it and re-distribute it without spending any money making it a very economical business choice. This practice has evolved to include Commercial Linux Distributions to simplify deployment and patch management.

Time to value with the Turbo LAMP stack

The LAMP stack has been popular because each component can be theoretically interchanged and adapted without lock in to a specific vendor software stack.  The need for more performance led to the development of the Turbo LAMP solution, a high performance LAMP stack, offering the performance and scalability necessary for demanding cloud, mobile, and big data solutions. It provides 2 major benefits: First, it improves time to value by automating the steps to deploy the solution. Second, it provides a much higher level of performance over a traditional x86 based LAMP stack.

Platform of choice: Power8 over Intel

The dominant solutions across several application categories such as e-commerce, content management, and analytics are all built on a LAMP stack. Intel processors have been, up to recently, the hardware platform of choice for LAMP stack solutions. For years, Intel had a price advantage with low-end servers, where LAMP stack had its open source beginnings. 

Now, the POWER8 system family is competitively priced with Linux only models and affordable for any business with its entry-level Power Systems with POWER8 processors. 

LAMP stack solutions have also grown to support many business critical systems of engagement, where more powerful, scalable, and reliable hardware systems are required. Linux on IBM Power Systems offers a competitive advantage and unique benefits to organizations - open technology, performance, portability and scalability.

Power8 Systems: The Performance and Reliability Advantage

With POWER8 systems customers now have a choice beyond the x86 platform for their Linux applications. IBM Power Systems are well known for their reliability, due to the servers Reliability, Availability and, Serviceability (RAS) features. IBM Power8 servers are optimized for the compute intensive performance demands of database and analytics applications, and can flexibly scale to support the demands of rapidly growing data.

IBM POWER8 will:

• Deliver insights 82x faster
• Provide 2X Performance vs. x86
• Offer 58% Lower cost of acquisition
• Require 66% Fewer systems

Power8 Systems: The Security Advantage

The superior security of the POWER8 server results in a reduced number of intrusions and lower security-related costs compared to the x86. 

Power8 Systems: The Economic advantage 

Power8 is an investment that will start paying for itself right away with up front savings due to fewer servers being required and providing a better value proposition. Power Systems servers offer a better path for business-critical enterprise solutions by allowing growth into higher-end scale-out and scale-up architectures than competing solutions from x86 providers, in addition to being more powerful and less costly. 

Leverage these assets to learn more about how Linux on Power8 improves performance, efficiency, and costs:

1. VIDEO: IBM Linux on Power Open Source Infrastructure Services

2. BLOG: Turbo-Charge Your Linux Applications with POWER

3. WHITE PAPER: The LAMP Stack for Today’s Demanding Application Workload Requirements

If you’re looking for the platform of choice built for the cloud and able to handle Big Data and powerful analytics - Look no further than IBM Power8. 

Gary Millward, Account Executive
Sentia