IBM To Deliver New POWER7 Systems To Manage Data-Intensive Applications - Printer Friendly version without Comments

Appeared on: Friday, August 27, 2010
IBM To Deliver New POWER7 Systems To Manage Data-Intensive Applications

IBM today announced new POWER7 systems designed to manage demanding workloads and emerging applications, including a high-end system that offers markedly better energy efficiency than competitive systems from HP and Oracle.

IBM claims that 285 customers moved critical business workloads to IBM systems and storage from the competition in the second quarter of 2010, including 171 from Oracle and 86 from HP. More than 2,600 companies have switched from the competition to IBM Power Systems since IBM established its Migration Factory program four years ago, teh company says.

IBM also presented some benchmark results. It's new systems showed a more than 2.5 times better performance than HP's best result, 69 percent greater performance per core, and 2.1 times better price/performance.

Compared to Oracle's solution, IBM's systems performed more than 35 percent better than Oracle's best performance result, 2.7 times better performance per core, and 41 percent better price performance.

In addition, IBM calculations on the IBM configuration show it requires 35 percent less energy per transaction compared to the energy usage data published by Oracle on the Oracle configuration.

The new systems ? servers, software and IBM's PowerVM virtualization capabilities ? allow customers to better manage ever-increasing amounts of data in an interconnected world and to conserve energy and floor space in burdened data centers.

New technology from IBM announced today includes the new high-end IBM Power 795 system; four entry-level POWER7 processor-based servers designed specifically for IBM's mid-market clients; and a POWER7 processor-based workload-optimized Smart Analytics System that helps businesses draw real-time information from massive amounts of data.

The new 256-core IBM Power 795 offers more than five times better energy efficiency compared to servers from Oracle and HP, IBM claims. It uses IBM's leading-edge EnergyScale technology that varies frequencies depending upon workloads. This new system supports up to 8 terabytes of memory and provides over four times the performance in the same energy envelope as the fastest Power 595 IBM POWER6 processor-based high-end system.

The new POWER7 technology supports four times as many processor cores as prior systems and uses the latest PowerVM virtualization software to allow IBM's customers to run over 1,000 virtual servers on a single physical system, enabling a substantial improvement in operating efficiency. For the many customers nearing capacity limits for energy, space and cooling in data centers, consolidating older systems to the new high-end Power 795 could result in more headroom ? with energy reductions of up to 75% for equivalent performance capacity ? allowing for workload growth in existing data centers and helping companies to potentially avoid or reduce the cost of expanding or building new data centers.

IBM also announced Power Flex, a new environment composed of two or more Power 795 systems, PowerVM Live Partition Mobility and a Flex Capacity Upgrade on Demand option. This solution enables IBM's clients to shift running applications from one system to another to perform system maintenance without downtime, helping to balance workloads and more easily handle peaks in demand.

IBM also announced a new version of IBM's UNIX operating system, AIX 7.

The four Express servers announced today ? IBM Power 710, 720, 730 and 740 Express ? offer mid-market clients the performance, energy efficiency and other benefits of POWER7 technology in compact rack-mount or tower packages. These servers minimize complexity and provide the memory capacity, internal storage options, I/O expandability and RAS features needed for demanding workloads in today's high-growth midsize business.

Priced starting at $6,385 and available from IBM and IBM Business Partners, these IBM Express models allow clients to choose the configuration that satisfies their requirements and receive half the processor core activations at no additional charge. The new Express servers run over 15,000 applications based on AIX, IBM i and Linux operating systems. PowerVM software is also optionally available on the four new Express models, allowing clients to consolidate multiple workloads on one or more servers.

The IBM Smart Analytics System 7700 with POWER7 technology delivers a single, optimized system with the right balance of software, systems and storage capabilities for workloads generating high amounts of data at extreme speeds ? providing a powerful analytics platform that can be deployed and customized for clients in a matter of days.

The Smart Analytics System, which features several pretested Power Systems 740 Express server configurations, IBM DB2 powered and InfoSphere Warehouse software and AIX, analyzes data where it resides.

For IBM i clients, IBM is offering four new IBM i Solution Editions, integrated and optimized for rapid ERP deployment. These packages feature software from SAP, JD Edwards, Infor and Lawson and offer significant savings for customers running older versions of the i operating system who are looking to upgrade.

IBM also announced IBM Rational Power Appliance, a family of software appliances comprised of Power Express servers that are pre-loaded and pre-configured with IBM Rational software for AIX development. Available in a range of sizes and programming languages to suit specific user requirements, these ready-to-use systems provide customers a fully-enabled software development environment that can be put to use in a matter of hours, rather than days or weeks.

As part of today's news, existing IBM Power System customers can benefit from exchange/upgrade opportunities. IBM Global Financing will offer side-by-side migrations of a customer's existing IBM POWER high end system to the newer IBM POWER7 technology. This will minimize downtimes during the upgrade process. IBM Global Financing will also provide competitive financing rates for customers acquiring or upgrading to the new technology. For more information visit: http://www-03.ibm.com/financing/us/lifecycle/manage/migration/index.html

Systems announced today will be generally available on September 17, 2010, IBM said.