IBM Launches New Power7 Systems

Completing its rollout of commercial Power7 systems for the year, IBM has announced new Power7 systems, including high-end systems and entry-level servers.

In an interview with eWEEK, Jeff Howard, director of Power systems marketing at IBM, said the new systems are designed to manage demanding workloads and emerging applications. And the new high-end system offers better energy efficiency than competitive systems from Oracle and Hewlett-Packard, Howard said

In all, IBM on Aug. 17 announced new systems, including servers, software and IBM's PowerVM virtualization capabilities, to enable customers to better manage increasing amounts of data in an interconnected world and to conserve energy and floor space in burdened data centers, IBM said. The new systems are part of a yearlong 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 health care, mobile telecommunications, and smarter traffic systems, Howard said.

The new systems include the high-end IBM Power 795 system; four entry-level Power7 processor-based servers designed specifically for midmarket clients; and a Power7 processor-based workload-optimized Smart Analytics System that helps businesses draw real-time information from massive amounts of data. All the systems announced will be available on Sept. 17, Howard said.

"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 in the IBM Systems & Technology Group, in a statement. "IBM Power Systems have raised the bar for performance, reliability and energy efficiency."

The new 256-core IBM Power 795 offers more than five times better energy efficiency compared with servers from Oracle and HP, Howard said. It 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's Power6 processor-based high-end system. 

In addition, the new Power7 technology supports four times as many processor cores as prior systems and uses IBM's latest PowerVM virtualization software to enable customers to run more than 1,000 virtual servers on a single physical system, Howard said.

And for customers nearing capacity limits for energy, space and cooling in data centers, consolidating older systems to the new high-end Power 795 could result in more headroom—with energy reductions of up to 75 percent for equivalent performance capacity, IBM said in a press release on the new technology.

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 handle peaks in demand. 

"This enables you to have a complete scale and execution system," Howard said. "It's a highly flexible scale-up and scale-out model where you can keep adding systems as you need."

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