IT Infrastructure: IBM Power7 Systems Celebrate Two-Year Milestone
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In February, IBM celebrated the two-year anniversary of its Power7 processor-based systems. IBM launched the systems on Feb. 8, 2010, and since then Power Systems have captured the Unix server market and competitive take-outs of Hewlett-Packard and Oracle systems have steadily increased, with more than 2,000 competitive displacements in the past two years, according to IBM. During IBM's recent fiscal fourth-quarter earnings call, CFO Mark Loughridge pointed out that the competitive displacements in 2011 generated more than $1 billion of business for Big Blue. IBM designed the Power7 systems to manage the most demanding emerging applications, ranging from smart electrical grids to real-time analytics for financial markets. The systems incorporate a number of industry-unique technologies for the specialized demands of new applications and services that rely on processing an enormous number of concurrent transactions and data while analyzing that information in real time. When compared with the previous-generation Power6 systems, Power7 systems can offer strong return on investment through dramatic improvements in price, performance, energy savings and virtualization for server consolidation. The Power7 systems can deliver four times the performance and four times the virtualization capability for the same price—and these systems are three to four times more energy-efficient.
