IBM has announced new POWER7 systems designed to manage the most demanding workloads and emerging applications, including a high-end system, which, the company says, offers better energy efficiency than competitive systems.
The new systems - servers, software and IBM's PowerVM virtualization capabilities - are intended to help customers to better manage increasing amounts of data, and to conserve energy and floor space in 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.
New technology from IBM includes the 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.
Providing high energy efficiency, the new 256-core IBM Power 795, 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.
The new POWER7 technology supports four times as many processor cores as prior systems and uses the latest PowerVM virtualization software to enable customers to run over 1,000 virtual servers on a single physical system, enabling a huge improvement in operating efficiency. For the many customers nearing capacity limits for energy, space and cooling in datacenters, 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 datacenters and helping companies avoid 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 clients to shift running applications from one system to another to perform system maintenance without downtime, helping to balance workloads and more easily handles peaks in demand. The company also announced a new version of IBM's UNIX operating system, AIX 7.
"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, IBM Systems & Technology Group. "IBM Power Systems have raised the bar for performance, reliability and energy efficiency."
In additional Power announcements, IBM announced that it 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 savings for customers running older versions of the i operating system who are looking to upgrade. IBM also announced IBM Rational Power Appliance (see article below), and enhanced solid state disk options on all POWER7 systems.
For more information on IBM workload optimized systems, go here.