 "IBM Unveils New POWER7 Systems To Manage Data-Intensive Services")
IBM has announced new POWER7 systems designed to manage demanding emerging applications, ranging from smart electrical grids to real-time analytics for financial markets. The new systems incorporate a number of technologies for the specialised demands of new applications and services that rely on processing an enormous number of concurrent transactions and data while analysing that information in real time.
In addition, the new systems enable clients to manage current applications and services at less cost with technology breakthroughs in virtualisation, energy savings, more cost-efficient use of memory, and better price performance.
Four New POWER Systems
The new systems and management software include:
• IBM POWER 780, a new category of scalable, high-end servers, featuring an advanced modular design with up to 64 POWER7 ‘cores’, or CPUs, and the new TurboCore workload optimising mode.
• IBM POWER 770, a modular enterprise system with up to 64 POWER7 cores.
• IBM POWER 755, a high-performance computing cluster node with 32 POWER7 cores, Energy Star qualified for energy efficiency, and optimised for challenging analytic workloads.
• IBM POWER 750 Express, an Energy Star qualified business server for mid-market clients.
• IBM Systems Director Express, Standard and Enterprise Editions, which offer new simplified packaging of management software for the new systems and include the advanced virtualisation management capabilities of VMControl. VMControl allows a ‘systems pool’ of multiple Power servers to be managed as one entity, which can enable reductions in management cost and complexity.
The POWER 750 Express and 755 planned volume ship date is February 19 and the POWER 770 and 780 planned volume availability is March 16. The IBM Systems Director Editions, supporting both POWER7 and POWER6 models, planned availability is March 5.
Workload-Optimised Features
To manage the demands of emerging applications, and better manage traditional applications, the new POWER7 systems are designed with workload-optimising technologies, such as faster cores and more throughput to manage massively parallel transactions; TurboCore mode, which is highly optimised for database or other transaction-oriented workloads; when not in TurboCore mode, all POWER7 processors are in MaxCore mode with up to 8-cores per socket and 4-threads per core – 32 threads total; finally, the threads are ‘Intelligent Threads’ that can dynamically vary based on workload demand.
For workloads that require large amounts of memory, or in virtualised environments where more memory is very beneficial, clients can utilise a new POWER7 technology, Active Memory Expansion, a capability that uses memory compression technology to make the physical memory on the system appear to the application as if it were up to twice as large as it actually is.
The POWER7 systems are also designed to make better use of energy. Unique Intelligent Energy technology allows customers to power on and off various parts of the system or to dynamically increase or decrease processor clock speeds based on thermal conditions and system utilisation, on a single server or across a pool of multiple servers.
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