POWER7: Using the latest technology and four new servers to enhance the system

February, IBM released the POWER7 technology and the latest server based on it. IBM publishes the power version on a fixed cycle, releasing next-generation technologies every three years. Many are surprised that the market expects POWER7 to be released in 2010, but it was released in the first quarter.

"We've been developing power technology for 20 years," said Jeff Howard, IBM Power Systems marketing director. We have been releasing the next generation of power technology in a well-defined cycle, and customers can estimate the approximate time we have to release the new technology. POWER7 's release is in line with this cycle, but it's actually a bit ahead of schedule, so we can provide power customers with more cost-effective products as soon as possible. POWER7 delivers improvements in both core performance and processing capabilities that customers can leverage to drive the most important workloads, such as smarter Energy, healthcare, retail, and financial services implementation workloads. ”

High cost performance is the main feature of POWER7. IBM focuses on workload optimization as a way to help customers do more work faster and at lower cost. The newly released four servers (Power 750, power 755, Power 770, and power 780) have increased workload optimization to a new level.

Change the pattern of the market

"IBM is changing the pattern of the UNIX market with amazing price/performance and functionality that will certainly change people's understanding of UNIX performance," said Howard. Not only do we continue to increase the number of cores on the server, but the performance of each core is also improving, unlike our competitors. We make this progress through a unique set of features that are unmatched by any vendor in the UNIX and x86 server markets. ”

One notable improvement is that a new power Systems server based on POWER7 technology can support up to 1,000 virtual machines through PowerVM. In addition to this improvement in virtualization scalability, the Power Systems server can provide the best energy efficiency in the marketplace. Energyscale technology can significantly reduce energy costs and management complexity through automatic energy optimization.

"The Power Systems server provides unrestricted virtualization," says Howard. "This means that, compared to VMware, IBM PowerVM can provide up to 32 times times the machine size, up to 8 times times of memory, and more flexibility for each virtual machine, and customers can dynamically add resources to virtual machines, or remove resources and assign them to other virtual machines."

"Like many of our customers, you can make the system more than 90% utilization levels," says Howard. "High system utilization can increase ROI, especially when compared to x86 systems or other UNIX systems, those systems typically run only from 15% to 20% of utilization."

"You can therefore consolidate 20, 30, or 40 competitive systems into a single power system server that can help customers save costs, resources, energy, software costs, maintenance costs, and data center sites," he explains. ”

700 Series

At the same time as publishing POWER7 technology, IBM released four new power Systems servers. These systems are briefly described below. For more information see "Meet the 700s"

(www.ibmsystemsmag.com/ibmi/webexclusive/31314p1.aspx).