IBM Extends Power Series Lineup

The IBM Power 795 system is also five times more energy efficient than rival offerings, said Tom Rosamilia, general manager of Power Systems and System z in IBM’s Systems and Technology Group.

IBM claims that the IBM Power 795 system, which can support up to 8 terabytes of memory, can run over 1,000 virtual machine instances on the same physical server. IBM also announced Power Flex, which allows two or more IBM Power 795 systems running virtual machine software to act as one logical system.

With this new system, IBM claims to have achieved the industry’s highest ever TPC-C (transaction processing) benchmark using a Power Systems configuration with DB2, hitting 10,366,254 transactions per minute, which beat Hewlett-Packard by more than 153 percent and Oracle by more than 35 percent. IBM claims that this result represents 2.7 times better performance per core than Oracle in an offering that is 40 percent less expensive. HP's best result is over twice as expensive as the IBM result.

According to Rosamilia, the IBM Power Series performance advantage stems not only from the number of cores in the system, but also from a more efficient multi-threaded processing architecture.

Rosamilia says IBM is not only seeing demand for faster performance using existing applications, but also new application areas that are characterized by thousands of sensors shipping data back to central servers across the Internet. This “Internet of things” is going to drive demand for servers that can process all that data in real time, said Rosamilia.

IBM also claims that 285 customers moved workloads to IBM systems and storage from the competition in the second quarter of 2010, including 171 from Oracle and 86 from HP.  More than 2,600 companies have switched to IBM Power Systems since IBM established its Migration Factory program four years ago, IBM said.

In addition to the IBM Power 795, IBM today also rolled out version 7 of its AIX operating system and unveiled four Express Server offerings, priced starting at $6,385 that are based on its Power 7 processor technology.