IBM has unveiled new POWER7 systems designed to manage the most demanding workloads and emerging applications, including a high-end system that offers better energy efficiency than competitive systems from HP and Oracle. 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. They are part of a year-long rollout by IBM of workload-optimized 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.
The new technology from IBM includes 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-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. 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 customers to run over 1,000 virtual servers on a single physical system.
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, which enables clients to shift running applications from one system to another to perform system maintenance without downtime.
The four Express servers - 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. The high-density, cost-efficient servers minimize complexity and provide the memory capacity, internal storage options, I/O expandability and RAS features needed for demanding workloads.
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.
Read Patrick Quairoli's blog on the new POWER7 systems. Quairoli, who is a technical alliance manager at Novell, writes, "There is a lot about IBM POWER and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for IBM POWER that I did not know. But the more I learned the more I understood how IBM was growing its share in the RISC market year over year and why Linux on POWER shows even more promise now than ever before."
The systems will be generally available on September 17, 2010. For complete details on IBM workload optimized systems, go here.