IBM introduces new Power Systems for Dynamic Infrastructures

IBM has announced new Power Systems™ blades, servers and virtualization software, all designed to help companies build and maintain a 21st Century dynamic infrastructure. The new hardware and software can offer Power Systems clients greater efficiency through intelligent management of their resources, helping them to reduce operational and energy costs and improve performance of their systems at the same time.

IBM Rolls Out New Blades, Power Systems Servers, Virtualization Technology

Designed To Help System Clients Build, Manage And Maintain Dynamic Infrastructure

IBM has announced new Power Systems™ blades, servers and virtualization software, all designed to help companies build and maintain a 21st Century dynamic infrastructure. The new hardware and software can offer Power Systems clients greater efficiency through intelligent management of their resources, helping them to reduce operational and energy costs and improve performance of their systems at the same time.

"With today's announcements, we're helping our clients take the right steps to ensure a more productive tomorrow," said Ross Mauri, general manager, IBM Power Systems. "We're introducing leading Power Systems technology, products and services, with better performance, efficiency and reliability than ever before. Our goal is to help companies gain business insights and work smarter within a more dynamic infrastructure."

The United States Bowling Congress is the national governing body for the sport of bowling serving more than 2.5 million adult and youth members. Recently, USBC consolidated its corporate data center on IBM Power servers, blades and PowerVM virtualization software, and is using intelligent sensor technology to manage power utilization to reduce cooling and electricity costs in its data center.

This new consolidated blade server-based data center helps to run the world’s largest participatory sporting event, the USBC Open Championships, and allows all the entry information, scheduling, and results to be updated and accessed in real time during the tournament’s 140-day run.

“As a member-funded nonprofit, USBC needs to find innovative ways to increase efficiency and reduce our energy costs,” USBC vice president of technology Jim Oberholtzer said. “Through IBM solutions, we can monitor the data center to optimize temperature and humidity. As a result, we are seeing nearly a 50 percent reduction in cooling that should eliminate over five tons of carbon emissions a year."

New Blades, Servers

Helping mid-size clients build flexible, cost-efficient data centers, IBM launched new blades and servers.The new BladeCenter® JS23 and JS43 Express are the premier blades for 64-bit applications and represent one of the most integrated platforms for i with a high degree of deployment flexibility, energy efficiency, scalability and manageability.

Utilizing a 4.2 GHz, 64-bit POWER6™ processor and available in a four-core or eight-core configuration -- including 32 MB Level 3 cache for each core pair and simultaneous multi-threading -- they are designed to deliver performance and scalability improvements at compelling prices.

The JS23 and JS43 exploit the newest in high-performance and energy-efficient solutions, such as simple expansion from 4-core to 8-cores for demanding workloads and support for solid state drives (SSD) for I/O intensive applications. All Power blades include built-in support for IBM PowerVM™ for advanced virtualization features. The JS23 and JS43 offer a blade server solution for driving demanding performance and memory-intensive workloads, such as virtualization and infrastructure consolidation, database and transaction processing, and high performance computing (HPC) applications.

The new blades can provide better performance per core than competitive systems, which can help reduce software licensing and other costs for clients. For example, a BladeCenter JS23 with four cores delivers twice the performance of an HP 860c Itanium blade according to industry benchmarks. (1)

IBM also announced virtual tape support for IBM i and BladeCenter implementations, simplifying backup and restore processing as well as the migration from tower/rack systems to a blade environment,

Power 520 and Power 550 Express Servers

Building on Power Systems momentum and outstanding performance, IBM has introduced new Power™ 520 and 550 Express servers with POWER6 processors, operating at 4.7GHz and a world's best 5.0GHz respectively.

By consolidating and optimizing applications onto a single platform, customers can lower their operational and energy costs and benefit from having a more dynamic infrastructure that results in increased business flexibility, agility and efficiency.

For example, companies can save up to 91 percent in energy usage and reduce floor space by 92 percent by consolidating 10 Sun Fire V490 servers into one Power 550 Express. (2)While using 90 percent fewer cores, clients can also take advantage of significant reductions in software costs.

Enhanced Virtualization

Businesses are increasingly turning to virtualization software to reduce their total number of servers, decrease data center floor space, control costs and create a cornerstone for overall corporate green initiatives.

PowerVM, IBM's virtualization solution, is now enabled for the first time with Active Memory Sharing, an advanced technology that allows memory to automatically flow from one logical partition to another for increased utilization and flexibility of memory usage. With this memory virtualization enhancement for POWER6 processor-based servers and blades, partitions can share a pool of memory and have that memory automatically allocated based on system workload demands.

PowerVM Active Memory Sharing is designed to increase memory utilization on systems that are running partitions with variable memory requirements. Instead of dedicating memory to partitions, Active Memory Sharing can automatically flow the memory between partitions as their memory demands change. For example, systems with partitions that serve different parts of the world or day and night workloads can have memory automatically moved from the partition that is winding down to the partition that is ramping up, improving memory utilization and system throughput.

This new virtualization feature is optionally configurable on a partition basis, enabling Power servers to support a combination of dedicated and shared memory partitions.

I/O Enhancements for Power Systems Users

IBM announced new energy-efficient solid state drives for its Power Systems line, offering faster I/O response time than traditional disk drives to help clients increase both performance and energy savings.

Unlike traditional hard disk drives which are often run at 50 percent or less of their storage capacity to help maintain consistent performance, SSDs can be run much closer to 100 percent storage capacity and still provide excellent performance. The new drives will be supported on all POWER6 systems, from blades to enterprise servers. IBM i provides an advanced, easy-to-use set of integrated management functions that allow clients to effectively integrate SSD technology into their shops.

In addition, IBM also introduced several solutions for mid-sized clients deploying a more dynamic infrastructure with IBM i, including:

  • A new 1.5 GB cache SAS disk controller with enhanced performance for IBM i applications, enabling full transition to a more cost-effective SAS-based disk infrastructure. The new controller provides significant performance and price enhancements, and supports both POWER5 and POWER6 clients.
  • Enhanced i Edition Express for BladeCenter S providing more memory in the base configuration as well as supporting virtual tape and the preload of IBM i.
  • DB2® Web Query business intelligence solutions for IBM i, with new spreadsheet plug-in and faster integration for both DB2 and MS SQL Server based data.

About IBM Power Systems

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Footnotes