A new line of IBM Power8-based Linux servers – the Power LC (Linux cluster) Line – has been launched. The new Power Systems LC servers are the first to be based on technologies and development efforts contributed by OpenPOWER Foundation partners – including Canonical, Mellanox, NVIDIA, Tyan and Wistron. The OpenPOWER Foundation, an organization with more than 150 members worldwide, builds solutions on top of the open architecture of IBM’s POWER8 processor.
Generally available later this year, the Power Systems LC line of servers will be offered in three different variations: the Power Systems S812LC, the Power Systems S822LC for commercial computing, and the Power Systems S822LC for high performance computing.
With this release, IBM is also providing clients with a new purchasing experience on their mobile devices or on the web. This new digital experience gives access, visibility and transparency of simple pricing to purchase Power Systems. Later this year, the digital experience will include a “click to buy” option enabling clients to purchase these systems on the web with a credit card.
"Clients need cognitive systems that are reliable, cost effective and capable of ingesting and making sense of incredible amounts of structured and unstructured data,” said Doug Balog, General Manager of IBM Power Systems. “Embracing an open model of innovation has enabled us to build systems that help translate mountains of data into actionable business insight. By collaborating with partners from the OpenPOWER Foundation, our new line of servers provides clients with the performance they need to analyze and act on their data in real time.”
The LC servers bring the higher performance of POWER8 CPUs to the broad Linux community. Based on IBM internal testing, a new Power Systems LC server can complete an average of select Apache Spark workloads – including analyzing Twitter feeds, streaming web page views and other data-intensive analytics – for less than half the cost of an Intel E5-2699 V3 processor-based server, providing clients with 2.3X better performance per dollar spent. Additionally, the design of a Power Systems LC server allows for 94% more Spark social media workloads in the same rack space as a comparable Intel-based server.
For more information about the announcement, go here.
To view a webcast about the new Power LC line, go here.
For more on the IBM Power Systems LC Server family, go here.
And for more perspective from IBM Systems magazine, read an article by Tami Deedrick, titled, "IBM Announces Linux Servers and OS Updates," here.