POWER7 new features: Power 7 features to help customers achieve dynamic infrastructure

The growing number of assets, data, transactions, and analytics involved in today's IT infrastructure requires more dynamic infrastructure. In February, IBM launched a new server with POWER7 chips, which positioned its power Systems product family in dynamic infrastructure products.

"In addition to connecting people to each other, organizations are connecting things to each other, so the information that has to be managed is increasing dramatically," said Scott Handy, IBM's vice-president in charge of power Systems global marketing. Today's infrastructure is often slow and inflexible, and infrastructure needs to be more dynamic in order to adapt to new conditions. Smarter systems must implement dynamic infrastructures. ”

IBM Systems Magazine, Power Systems Edition, recently interviewed Handy to learn more about how POWER7 can help customers achieve dynamic infrastructure.

Q: This announcement seems to involve a lot of dynamic infrastructure features. Can you talk about some of the more important things?

A: Our virtualization features are scalable, configurable, and can achieve predictable performance, which is what the customer really needs. Not only do you achieve higher utilization, you can also achieve predictable performance, which allows the right workloads to get resources in a resource-constrained environment. Virtualization can implement shared pools, while some applications can treat resources in these shared pools as dedicated resources, so they get resources when resources are needed. Share resources when resources are available, and achieve predictable performance for certain applications that have time or transaction requirements or are important for the business.

Compared with POWER6 technology, one of the characteristics of POWER7 is that it takes these two requirements into account in an advanced way. Power has been the most outstanding in transactional performance. POWER7 technology continues this advantage. We have added another pattern that can handle workloads that contain many concurrent transactions. In places where multiple cores and threads are required, parallel computing can significantly increase throughput. For example, Java can achieve very good performance when working with many threads.

To achieve the best transactional performance, we have increased the performance of each kernel to twice times the POWER6 server through the Tubrocore mode. Simply put, the way to do this is to activate 4 of the 8 cores on the chip, but let them use all the 8 cores of all the memory cache and memory bandwidth, and increase the clock speed a bit. This pattern will be used in many transactions required for the realization of the wisdom of the Earth. For example, to manage more transactional workloads such as roads, wells, energy, water sensors and actuators, or credit card transactions and banking, processing these data requires Tubrocore mode.

Now, POWER7 technology allows the server to adopt Maxcore mode. This pattern is best suited to WEB infrastructure workloads, which can run up to 4 threads per core. Because there are 4 threads per core, the application will feel that the chip has 32 "cores" instead of 8. In this mode, the system automatically adjusts itself to achieve the best performance. I mean, when running in Maxcore mode and activating all cores, if the workload is light, the system runs a thread on each core. As utilization and throughput requirements increase, the system automatically increases the number of threads running on each kernel to 2, 3 to 4, and decreases as demand drops.

I've talked to the client about this model and it's easy for them to understand. This fits their current way of organizing data centers. They have a database pool and a WEB infrastructure made up of servers, and now they can connect to a variety of things. IBM adjusts the technology in the way customers expect it to.

Q: In 2009, increasing energy efficiency and limiting/reducing costs are the most concerned issues for many companies. Do you think the 2010 issues are still the most important?

A: I totally agree that energy efficiency is the most concerned issue for customers. They are trying to reduce the use of energy and do more work with the same energy. This can be done in two ways. Customers want to increase the amount of energy per unit of processing capacity, we can increase the capacity of the Unit to deal with energy two or three times times. Or, you can use half the energy to achieve the same performance.

Some customers are trying to reduce the current use of energy. There are also customers who are experiencing problems that cannot increase their processing power because the data centers are at their limits and they want to avoid building more data centers. With POWER7 technology, you can replace a large number of low-end servers with a power server, which provides four times or five times times the same amount of processing power.