IBM: Why Xeon Servers Aren’t A Me-Too Game

Virtualisation can change the world – with more memory

As well as softare savings, this expansion of memory size is also needed, Wanduragala told eWEEK Europe, as more memory is vitally needed for the next developments in data centres.

“Virtualisation is hamstrung by memory capacity,” he said. “If you can get more memory on your server, you can virtualise more.” There’s also another, not so obvious benefit, in saving software licence fees, he points out, because software is usually licensed per server core. More virtual machines and more processes running on the same core means less money spent on software licensing.

With a massive increase in memory within the data centre, more functions will migrate there, said Wanduragala. “People will virtualise desktops, bringing in more infrastructure into the data centre. That’s where the requirment for memory will come from – we can reshape our data centres.”

Along with memory, IBM has also added to the Intel processor’s reliability features, said Wanduragala. While the Xeon 7500 can fix single bit errors on any virtual machine, IBM’s supporting silicon can add further reliability with higher level error correction.

He also found time to mention IBM’s work on lower energy power supplies, and servers which use solid state disks for high I/O performance in a product called xFlash. “xFlash gives a quarter of a million IOPs – normal machines give you 300 IOPs. XFlash is equivalent to 100 racks of spinning disks.”

Death of Power?

But what about the overlap with the RISC world? Surely IBM’s support of increasingly powerful Intel Xeons must eventually spell death for IBM’s Power chip?  Wanduragala maintains that isn’t so: “People said the mainframe is dead but it isn’t – and nor is Power.” IBM launched its Power7 processors in Februrary, claiming a massive performance increase, and the company would “not hold back” in future, Wanduragala promised, as the system is aimed for a “fundamentally different” environment.

“It’s not just the SpecInt [benchmark performance], it is the whole environment,” said Wanduragala. “It is the market that will decide, based on the environment we provide, not just the chip.”