New IBM POWER7 Blades, Systems Software, Services Cut IT Costs, Pave Way for New Workloads for Customers

ARMONK, N.Y., April 13 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- IBM (NYSE: IBM) today added new servers, services and software to its lineup of 2010 systems designed to put a lid on the rising costs and complexities of operating modern data centers. The new offerings help clients reap the benefits of IBM's three-year, $3 billion investment in POWER7™ systems that are ready for new workloads, such as the growing use of powerful, real-time business analytics.  

(Logo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20090416/IBMLOGO )

They include blade servers built on IBM's POWER7 workload-optimized systems' design, new systems software that can reduce the deployment of workloads from weeks to minutes, and new services to remotely implement the systems, reducing costs by up to 25%.

IBM also announced its POWER7 technology achieved record performance for a range of workloads.

New POWER7 Blades, Systems Software, Services: Improved Performance, Reduced Data Center Costs

With four, eight or 16 cores per blade, the new POWER7 servers offer clients the same 64-bit POWER® technology at work in some of the world's most critical data centers in government, research, finance and high-tech industries, among others.

Built on the proven foundation of the IBM BladeCenter® family of products and designed for mid-size businesses needing enhanced performance to manage growth and reduce complexity, the all new PS700, PS701 and PS702 Express are the premier blades for workloads ranging from web-tier and SAP application servers to distributed databases in blade-based data centers. POWER7's innovative technologies automatically optimize the blades' performance and energy efficiency, allowing the new BladeCenter PS702 Express to deliver 225% better performance per blade than the Oracle Sun Blade T6340, and 188% greater performance per blade than the HP Integrity BL860c Blade. (1)

For more information go to: http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/power/

New IBM Systems Director Software helps adjust computing resources in virtualized data center environments to focus on priority workloads. With IBM Systems Director 6.2 and IBM Systems Director VMControl, multiple virtualized and physical systems can be managed from a single interface, new workloads can be deployed in minutes instead of weeks, and server administration costs can be reduced up to 34%.  IBM Active Energy Manager 4.3 monitors and manages energy use and can reduce systems energy costs by nearly 30% on Power servers. (2)

For more information on new IBM Systems Director, VMControl and Active Energy Manager offerings go to: http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/software/index.html

IBM Global Technology Services' new, remotely delivered implementation and migration services provide a lower-cost method (shaves up to 25% from installation costs) to install and implement IBM systems. Remote delivery allows IBM to staff engagements more quickly and gives clients a faster return on their investment. Initially available in the U.S. and Canada with plans to expand to the rest of the world later in the year, these remotely delivered, lower priced services help clients optimize system performance and reduce time to value.

For more information, go to: www.ibm.com/services/implementation

IBM also announced today a new exchange program to allow clients to upgrade to POWER7 technology immediately. IBM's lending and leasing unit, IBM Global Financing, is offering well-qualified clients to move up to POWER7 systems at monthly costs close to, or lower than what they are paying for a current POWER6™ lease.  The program also provides for side-by-side migration of up to 60 days with little to no downtime as the upgrade occurs.

For more information go to: http://www-03.ibm.com/financing/us/lifecycle/acquire/powerx.html

Eight-Core POWER7 System Boosts Transaction-Processing Performance to Slash Licensing Costs More Than 80%

Using a sliver of its total, 64-core processing power, IBM's Power® 780 system today became the first server to deliver more than 1.2 million transactions-per-minute on only eight cores according to Transaction Processing Performance Council results. With price/performance of less than 70 cents per transaction per minute, the Power 780's 1.2 million transactions-per-minute sets a new record in performance-per-core – 4.6 times better than an HP Superdome and 7.5 times better than a Sun SPARC Enterprise T5440 cluster running Oracle RAC. (3)

For businesses that run SAP, the Power 780 handled 37,000 users on 64 cores – 16% more users than a 256-core Sun Enterprise M9000 and 130% more users than a 64-core Fujitsu system running Intel Xeon® X7560 chips. (4)

Record-Setting Performance for Web and Analytics Workloads

The Power 780 also demonstrated the ability to deliver leadership, workload-optimized performance by setting new records across the three major industry-standard processor benchmarks for Java, integer and high-performance-computing workloads, achieving between 1.8 and three-times the performance of all other competitive published eight-socket results. (5)

IBM Power Systems' built-in virtualization provides the ability to scale virtual machines to the full capacity of the system – up to eight-times more than VMware.  IBM testing indicates clients deploying virtualization may see up to 65% more performance-per-virtual machine on a Power 750 Express running PowerVM™ than a similarly configured HP DL380 G6 running VMware. (6)

Today's benchmark results continue to demonstrate that IBM Power Systems are able to deliver more compute power with fewer cores and less energy consumption than Sun/Oracle and HP/Itanium® based servers. This performance leadership across all major workloads, combined with Power systems' built-in virtualization technology means clients can achieve dramatic cost savings and energy efficiency in their data centers. For instance, by using 87% fewer  cores than a Sun SPARC Enterprise Cluster to deliver more than one million transactions per minute, the Power 780 allows clients to slash database licensing and maintenance costs by up to 80%. (7)

New Operating Environments, Developer Tools

New AIX® 6 Express Edition offers clients a new, lower-priced edition of AIX designed for SMB environments or smaller workloads consolidated on midrange or high-end Power Systems. Supporting up to four cores per image and 8GB per core, AIX 6 Express provides the reliability and flexibility of AIX at lower cost. AIX Express joins the existing AIX Standard and Enterprise Editions to fill out the new family of AIX 6 offerings.

The new IBM i 7.1 integrated operating environment is designed to take advantage of workload optimization features of POWER7, including automatic exploitation of Solid State Drives for optimum performance.  Enhanced support for XML in DB2®, the integrated database for IBM i, helps companies exchange information between customers and suppliers, a new virtualization feature for PowerVM enables simpler testing of new releases before a software upgrade, and asynchronous geographic mirroring with PowerHA™ SystemMirror provides support for multi-site clustering over longer distances.  

For more information go to: www.ibm.com/systems/power/software/i/advantages/v7r1/index.html

IBM Rational Developer for Power V7.6 gives users of Power Systems on AIX a modern, Eclipse-based development environment that supports C/C++ and COBOL development, and is also tightly integrated with Rational Team Concert for Power Systems for improved application lifecycle management. IBM is also introducing Rational compilers for C/C++ and Fortran, both optimized for POWER7. This new environment can provide up to 30% improvement in workload productivity. (8)

For more information go to http://www-01.ibm.com/software/rational/announce/power/

For more information on new products announced today and to register for a special IBM webcast visit http://www.ibm.com/systems

IBM is a trademark of IBM Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. All other company/product names and service marks may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies.  UNIX is a registered trademark in the United States and other countries licensed exclusively through The Open Group.  Linux is a trademark of Linus Torvald.

Notes

(1) SPEC® and the benchmark names SPECrate®, SPECint®, and SPECjbb® are registered trademarks of the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation. For the latest SPEC benchmark results, visit http://www.spec.org. All results are the best result posted at www.spec.org as of April 5, 2010 for the system indicated except for the IBM BladeCenter result which was submitted to SPEC as of April 13, 2010.  

SPECint_rate 2006 results: IBM BladeCenter PS702 with 16 cores, two processor chips, and four threads per core had a peak result of 520. HP Integrity BL860c i2 with 8 cores, 2 processor chips and two threads per core had a peak result of 134.  Sun Blade T6340 with 16 cores, two processor chips and eight threads per core had a peak result of 160.

SPECjbb2005 results: : IBM BladeCenter PS702 with 16 cores, two processor chips, and four threads per core running with 16 JVM instances had a result of 1,119,946 bops and 69,997 bops per JVM. Sun Blade T6340 with 16 cores, two processor chips and eight threads per core running with 16 JVM instances had a result of 388,456 bops and 24,279 bops per JVM.

(2) Source: ftp://ftp.software.ibm.com/common/ssi/sa/wh/n/xbw03007usen/XBW03007USEN.PDF

page 3 of VALUE PROPOSITION FOR IBM SYSTEMS DIRECTOR

Challenges of Operational Management for Enterprise Server Installations

International Technology Group

(3) Transaction performance based on tpmC results as on 4/9/2010.  Source: Transaction Processing Performance Council, www.tpc.org as of 4/9/10. IBM result submitted on 4/13/10. IBM Power 780 with 2 processor chips, 8 cores, 16 threads achieved 1,200,011 tpmC @ $.69 $/tpmC. Database was DB2 9.1 on AIX 6.1.  System availability is 10/13/2010.  tpmC per core is 150,001.  HP Integrity Superdome with 64 processor chips, 128 cores, 256 threads achieved 4,092,799 tpmC @ $2.93 $/tpmC. Database was Oracle 10g on HP-UX 11i v3.  System availability was 8/6/2007.  tpmC per core is 31,975.  Sun/Oracle T5440 cluster with 48 processor chips, 384 cores, 3,072 threads achieved 7,646,486 tpmC @ $2.36 $/tpmC. Database was Oracle 11g EE RAC on Solaris 10.  System availability was 3/19/2010.  tpmC per core is 19,913.  IBM x3850 M2 with 4 processor chips, 16 cores, 16 threads achieved 516,752 tpmC @ $2.59 $/tpmC. Database was DB2 9.5 on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.  System availability was 3/14/2008.  tpmC per core is 32,297.

(4) The  IBM Power 780 achieved the highest result ever published on the two-tier SAP® Sales and Distribution (SD) standard application benchmark running SAP enhancement package 4 for the SAP ERP application Release 6.0 (Unicode) with a result of 37,000 SAP SD benchmark users. The 64-core Power 780 handled 16 percent more users  than a 256-core Sun Enterprise M9000 (Oracle's biggest system) and 130 percent more users than a 64-core Fujitsu 1800E system running Intel's Xeon X7560 chip. IBM Power System 780, 8p / 64–c / 256–t, POWER7, 3.8 GHz, 1024 GB memory,  37,000 SD users, dialog resp.: 0.98s, line items/hour: 4,043,670, Dialog steps/hour: 12,131,000, SAPS: 202,180, DB time (dialog/ update):0.013s / 0.031s, CPU utilization: 99%, OS: AIX 6.1, DB2 9.7, cert# 2010013;  SUN M9000, 64p / 256-c / 512–t, 1156 GB memory, 32,000 SD users, SPARC64 VII, 2.88 GHz, Solaris 10, Oracle 10g , cert# 2009046; Fujitsu 1800E, 8p / 64-c / 128-t, 512 GB memory, 16,000 SD users, Intel Xeon X7560, 2.26 GHz, Windows Server 2008 R2 DE, SQL Server 2008, cert#: 2010010.   All results are 2-tier, SAP EHP 4 for SAP ERP 6.0 (Unicode) and valid as of 4/1/2010.  

All SAP Sales and Distribution 2-tier benchmark results can be found at http://www.sap.com/solutions/benchmark/sd2tier.epx

(5) Best in class 8-socket results: IBM Power 780 64-core (3.86 GHz, 8 chips, 8 cores/chip,4 threads/core) SPECint_rate2006 result of 2,526; IBM Power 780 64-core (3.86 GHz, 8 chips, 8 cores/chip,4 threads/core) SPECfp2006 result of 2,240; IBM Power 780 64-core (8 chips, 128 threads) 3.86 GHz IBM Power 780 System running AIX V6.1 with a SPECjbb2005 result of 5,210,501 bops (81,414 bops/JVM).  

Competitive 8-socket results: SPECint_rate2006: Fujitsu PRIMEQUEST 1800E 64-core (Intel Xeon X7560, 8 chips, 8 cores/chip, 2 threads/core) SPECint_rate2006 result of 1339; SPECfp_rate 2006: SGI Altix ICE 8200EX 32-core (Intel Xeon X5570, 2.93 GHz, 8 chips, 4 cores/chip, 2 threads/core) SPECfp_rate2006 result of 742; SPECjbb2005: Hewlett-Packard Company, HP DL785 G6 achieved 1,984,616 bops (248,077 bops/JVM on a 480core system (8 chips, 48 threads).

SPEC and the benchmark names SPECrate, SPECint, and SPECjbb are registered trademarks of the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation. Benchmark results stated reflect results published on www.spec.org (link resides outside ibm.com) as of April 8, 2010.

(6) “A Comparison of PowerVM and VMware Virtualization Performance”, April 2010.  White Paper available through www.ibm.com.

(7) Claim based on comparing an 8-core Power 780 system vs. a cluster of two Sun SPARC Enterprise T5440 both of which are estimated to deliver over 1 million OLTP transactions per minute. For details on the comparison please go to:

http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/migratetoibm/systems/power/power7_legal_footnotes/index.html

(8) According to IBM Business Partner Oxford International, a leading provider of enterprise modernization solutions, new IBM Rational application development and management software for POWER7 is providing improvements of up to 30 percent in team productivity in all aspects of the development process.

SOURCE IBM