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IBM's New Power 7 Server Lineup: More Speed

By - Source: Tom's Hardware US | B 14 comments

Company stresses energy efficiency and performance over competitors HP and Oracle.

IBM this week introduced a range of new Power 7-based servers that fill out its System p offerings on both the high-end and low-end of the performance scale. The new servers come a few months after the first batch of mostly mid-range servers came on the market, the first to support IBM's Power 7 processor.

IBM introduced the Power 7 processor in February. The processor comes in four-, six- and eight-core configurations and is aimed squarely at Intel's Itanium and Sun's UltraSparc. IBM has been quite aggressive in pursuing those customers with offers of migration assistance in moving off the old hardware.

On the low end, IBM announced four servers under the "Express" brand name, starting at $6,385. These servers – formally named IBM Power 710, 720, 730 and 740 Express – are designed as power-efficient rack-mounted or tower servers for small to medium-sized companies, or as departmental servers.

The Power 710 Express is a one-socket, 2U rack server; the Power 720 Express is a one-socket server available as either a 4U or a tower; the Power 730 Express is a two-socket, 2U rack server; and the Power 740 Express is a one- or two-socket server in either a 4U rack or a tower configuration.

They can be loaded with IBM's AIX Unix, Linux, or IBM i, which was previously known as i5/OS.

On the high-end, IBM is offering the Power 795, a server capable of scaling to 64 processors and 8TB of memory. IBM says it is more than four times the performance of the best of IBM's previous generation of servers, the Power 595.

The Power 795 also has a number of unique IBM features to improve performance. It uses IBM's EnergyScale technology to vary the CPU clock frequency based on the workload, while Active Memory Expansion uses memory compression technology to make the physical memory on the server appear to be double what it actually is.

The new servers also come with IBM's PowerVM virtualization software, which can run more than 1,000 virtual servers on a single physical system. Customers can connect two Power 795 systems with Power Flex, which allows administrators to shift workloads between systems while they are running live, helping to balance workloads without interruption.

The new IBM servers are expected to ship on September 17.

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  • -5 Hide
    willgart , August 26, 2010 7:10 PM
    no desktop edition ? ;) 
    8TB of RAM is what I need!!!
  • -5 Hide
    nevertell , August 26, 2010 7:19 PM
    Wow, imagine running pr0n off of an 8tb ramddisk.

    But seriousley, If I had at least 10 gb of ram, I'd run a script that is executed as fast as possible in the boot sequence to copy my whole /boot, /etc, /usr, /tmp and /var on it. And a script for shutdown so it's all copied back to disk in the end.
  • 0 Hide
    hellwig , August 26, 2010 7:58 PM
    Quote:
    The processor comes in four-, six- and eight-core configurations and is aimed squarely at Intel's Itanium and Sun's UltraSparc. IBM has been quite aggressive in pursuing those customers with offers of migration assistance in moving off the old hardware.
    I really don't see how this is possible. Aren't the architectures completely different? Wouldn't you have to convince new customers to recompile their entire codebase (or, at the very least, obtain pre-compiled copies from the vendor under some sort of maintenance contract)? Seems to me, this is just an upgrade for existing IBM customers, and an option for brand new customers. I don't think you'd convince anyone to move from Itanium or UltraSpark.
  • Display all 14 comments.
  • -5 Hide
    bison88 , August 26, 2010 8:11 PM
    IBM Power CPU lineups are hardly interesting since their main client (Apple) dropped them 5 years ago. They do tend to find themselves in IBM's superscomputers which are always fun to watch in the race to an Exaflop.
  • 1 Hide
    Anonymous , August 26, 2010 8:17 PM
    hellwig, much code today is not locked to a specific processor as it was in the old days of assembler coding. Ahh I remember it fondly. Code is written by compilers that don't care about the hardware and firmware underpinnings because such is isolated by additional layers of coding that has been standardized. For example Java is pretty portable, can run most anywhere on most anything without having to recompile. Now if you want to take advantage of a specific unique feature that the p box has or you move say from a Weblogic to a WebSphere server you might have to do some recompiling to take advantage of specific unique features.
  • 0 Hide
    Anonymous , August 26, 2010 9:26 PM
    It's doubtful I could be convinced to upgrade from the AS/400 we still use for medical records to something they are offering.. if only because I know it'll cost a pretty penny to 'migrate'
  • 0 Hide
    mayne92 , August 27, 2010 1:03 AM
    ^^^ Given what I've seen in the intellectual power of some Tom's readers, I feel many would actually click and do business with the spammer above...
  • 2 Hide
    falchard , August 27, 2010 1:18 AM
    Wait a minute. Let me get this straight. IBM has a competitor?
  • 1 Hide
    dEAne , August 27, 2010 3:29 AM
    I opt for IBM than HP servers.
  • 1 Hide
    xrodney , August 27, 2010 6:41 AM
    hellwigI really don't see how this is possible. Aren't the architectures completely different? Wouldn't you have to convince new customers to recompile their entire codebase (or, at the very least, obtain pre-compiled copies from the vendor under some sort of maintenance contract)? Seems to me, this is just an upgrade for existing IBM customers, and an option for brand new customers. I don't think you'd convince anyone to move from Itanium or UltraSpark.

    Personally i am supporting both and find P5-7 systems more stable and reliable then itanium. Also "offers of migration assistance in moving off the old hardware" is about moving/migrate data and software to new system/platform.
  • -2 Hide
    manitoublack , August 27, 2010 7:19 AM
    But can it play Crysis???

    Sorry :( 
  • 0 Hide
    powerbaselx , August 27, 2010 2:26 PM
    hellwigI really don't see how this is possible. Aren't the architectures completely different? Wouldn't you have to convince new customers to recompile their entire codebase (or, at the very least, obtain pre-compiled copies from the vendor under some sort of maintenance contract)? Seems to me, this is just an upgrade for existing IBM customers, and an option for brand new customers. I don't think you'd convince anyone to move from Itanium or UltraSpark.


    You're completelly out of enterprise market! HW vendors do this all the time with SW and database migration programs that usually don't take too long. I think Itanium will dye soon without Microsoft support anymore. It's the more expensive Unix processor out there!
  • 0 Hide
    powerbaselx , August 27, 2010 2:27 PM
    falchardWait a minute. Let me get this straight. IBM has a competitor?


    LOL! IBM Fanboy!
  • 0 Hide
    powerbaselx , August 27, 2010 2:35 PM
    bison88IBM Power CPU lineups are hardly interesting since their main client (Apple) dropped them 5 years ago. They do tend to find themselves in IBM's superscomputers which are always fun to watch in the race to an Exaflop.


    Another person completly out of the enterprise market!
    AFAIU there are several distincts aspects there.
    First it was tough for IBM to loose Apple for Intel since IBM was closer to AMD at that point and already was pushing the POWER cpu's market. Anyway today no one related enterprise POWER cpu's with Apple since Apple don't belong to the server market and neither IBM belong to the desktop and consumer market.
    POWER cpu's developed so much, using base technologies that Intel also uses (that High-K stuff in 32nm and 28nm chips...) that in Unix servers are just ahead of its main competitors in most important business applications.
    Another thing are the mainframes which today IBM is one of the last companies to produce it depending on its own techology. CRAY and HP uses Intel cpu's. I think Fujitsu also... anyway, the banks depend on it's extreme reliability and very secure architecture based on HW encriptation., etc

    Just my 2 cents on the subject!