IBM Announces New Power7 Systems

Completing its rollout of commercial Power7 systems for the year, IBM has announced new Power7 systems, including high-end systems and entry-level servers.

In an interview with eWEEK, Jeff Howard, director of Power systems marketing at IBM, said the new systems are designed to manage demanding workloads and emerging applications. And the new high-end system offers better energy efficiency than competing systems from Oracle and HP, Howard said

In all, IBM on 17 August announced new systems, including servers, software and IBM’s PowerVM virtualisation capabilities, to enable customers to better manage increasing amounts of data in an interconnected world and to conserve energy and floor space in burdened data centres, IBM said. The new systems are part of a year-long rollout by IBM of workload-optimised systems for the demands of emerging business models such as smart electrical grids, real-time analytics in financial markets and healthcare, mobile telecommunications, and smarter traffic systems, Howard said.

The new systems include the new high-end IBM Power 795 system; four entry-level Power7 processor-based servers designed specifically for mid-market clients; and a Power7 processor-based workload-optimised Smart Analytics System that helps businesses draw real-time information from massive amounts of data. And all the systems announced will be available on 17 September, Howard said.

“IBM continues to make the investments in systems, processors, systems software, operating systems and middleware necessary to lead the industry and meet the need of customers’ growing workloads,” said Tom Rosamilia, general manager of Power Systems and System z in the IBM Systems & Technology Group, in a statement. “IBM Power Systems have raised the bar for performance, reliability and energy efficiency.”

Energy Efficiency

The new 256-core IBM Power 795 offers more than five times better energy efficiency compared to servers from Oracle and HP, Howard said. It uses IBM’s 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.

In addition, the new Power7 technology supports four times as many processor cores as prior systems and uses IBM’s latest PowerVM virtualisation software to enable customers to run over 1,000 virtual servers on a single physical system, Howard said.

And for customers nearing capacity limits for energy, space and cooling in data centres, consolidating older systems to the new high-end Power 795 could result in more headroom – with energy reductions of up to 75 percent for equivalent performance capacity, IBM said.

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 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.

“This enables you to have a complete scale and execution system,” Howard said. “It’s a highly flexible scale up and scale out model where you can keep adding systems as you need.”

Momentum In Unix Market

IBM announced a new version of IBM’s Unix operating system, AIX 7, Howard said. AIX 7 features the capability to run older AIX 5.2 environments in a workload partition on top of AIX 7. AIX 7 has been gone through an open beta process and had more than 1,200 downloads, Howard said.

IBM announced a pair of developments that illustrate the company’s continued momentum for its Power systems technology in the $13bn (£8bn) Unix market, in which IBM has experienced a 14-point revenue share gain since 2005, company officials said.

One such development is that IBM claims it has achieved the industry’s highest TPC-C (transaction processing) benchmark on a Power Systems configuration with DB2, hitting 10,366,354 transactions per minute, which exceeds Oracle’s and HP’s best results by more than 35 percent, according to Howard.

The other development is the number of migrations IBM has seen recently from competing platforms. Howard said 285 customers moved business workloads to IBM systems and storage from the competition in the second quarter of 2010, including 171 from Oracle and 86 from HP. And more than 2,600 companies have switched from the competition to IBM Power Systems since IBM established its Migration Factory program four years ago, he said. Moreover, IBM’s business helping customers reduce x86 server sprawl by consolidating to Power increased four-fold over the first quarter, he said.

Mid-Market Servers

IBM announced four Express servers – IBM Power 710, 720, 730 and 740 Express – to provide mid-market customers with the performance, energy efficiency and other benefits of Power7 technology in compact rack-mount or tower packages.

The systems are priced starting at $6,385 and are available from IBM and IBM business partners. Customers can choose the configuration that satisfies their requirements and receive half the processor core activations at no additional charge. The new Express servers run more than 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.

Howard said the new IBM Smart Analytics System 7700 with Power7 delivers a purpose-built analytics platform that can be deployed and customised for clients in a matter of days, Howard said. This solution helps clients quickly draw insights from vast amounts of data to anticipate emerging business trends, capture new opportunities and avoid risks, he said.

The Smart Analytics System, which features several pre-tested Power Systems 740 Express server configurations, IBM DB2 Powered and InfoSphere Warehouse software and AIX, analyses data where it resides.

Rational Power Appliance

IBM also announced its new 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.

“This is a complete set of Rational tools on a Power appliance,” Howard.

Also as part of this round of announcements, IBM said for its IBM i customers, the company will deliver four new IBM i Solution Editions, integrated and optimised for rapid ERP deployment. These packages feature software from SAP, JD Edwards, Infor and Lawson and offer savings for customers running older versions of the i operating system who are looking to upgrade, IBM said.

IBM also announced enhanced solid state disk options on all Power7 systems.