IBM Preps for Power7 Processor Release

IBM officials say Power7 will offer enhanced virtualization and management capabilities. The chips, which will come with four, six and eight processing cores, will include PowerVM improvements that will enable businesses to consolidate up to 1,000 virtual machines onto a single physical server.

IBM also is enhancing the virtualization capabilities in its System Director management software through the introduction of Systems Director VMControl.

With the new software, enterprises can discover, monitor and locate virtual resources, create and manage VMs and run workloads through an interface common to IBM's System z mainframes, System x x86 servers, BladeCenter blade systems and Power servers running AIX, Linux and i platforms.

The Director VMControl Express Edition enables businesses to create, change and delete VMs and move them to other locations. With the Standard Edition, enterprises will be able to import, create, delete and deploy virtual images and keep those images in a virtual library.

An Enterprise Edition, due for release later in 2009, will enable businesses to also manage pools of virtual systems.

The Express and Standard editions will be available for download July 24.

"IBM is serious about addressing clients' needs for heterogeneous virtualization management with consumable, simplified and integrated packaged offerings," Scott Handy, vice president of IBM Power Systems, said in a statement.

IBM's TCO Center of Excellence is aimed at helping businesses get a handle on server sprawl in their data centers. IBM officials said Power systems and PowerVM virtualization software are designed to help businesses consolidate by eliminating under-used Unix and x86 servers and putting those workloads onto fewer Power systems.