IBM today introduced its IBM Power11 server, which the tech giant says allows enterprise clients, including banks, to avoid scheduled downtime, keeping applications online — and ultimately saving money. 

Services aren’t available during downtime, which enterprises schedule for IT maintenance and updates.  

Planned downtime is common in highly regulated industries, like financial services, to activate new features during off hours while minimizing consumer impact, according to a 2024 Oxford Economics report, conducted in partnership with IT service provider Splunk. 

Power11 uses autonomous patching and automated workload movement to allow for updates without taking applications offline, Bargav Balakrishnan, vice president of product management at IBM Infrastructure, said today.  

Scheduled maintenance

TD Bank, for one, scheduled maintenance to its online systems over the holiday weekend, according to its website. An announcement on the site stated: “We are performing some regularly scheduled maintenance on our systems between the hours of 21:00 PM EST Saturday July 5th – 06:00 AM EST Sunday July 6th.” 

Scheduled downtime incurs a cost, since operations are down, of up to $5.6 million per year, according software provider Cockroach Labs. 

Even with planned updates, outages can occur. Last year, cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike released a patch that resulted in an IT outage affecting financial institutions, airlines and stock exchanges worldwide.  

The outage was estimated to cost Fortune 500 companies $5.4 billion, according to risk management company Parametrix. 

AI to manage system health

IBM’s Power11 leans on IBM Concert’s generative AI and IBM Technology Lifecycle Services to manage system operations, according to today’s release.  

IBM Concert uses gen AI to identify issues within an application before an outage occurs, identifying risks, recommending remediation and automating troubleshooting. 

IBM Technology Lifecycle Services uses AI to monitor system health, reduce downtime and optimize system reliability. 

With a proactive approach to system health, Power11 can help enterprises avoid downtime, planned or unplanned, Balakrishnan said. 

Noteworthy unplanned outages this year include: 

• $210 billion-asset Huntington Bank on May 7;  

• Tech provider Fiserv on May 2; and 

• $1.7 trillion-asset Citibank on April 29.

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