System iNetwork

October 8, 2008

IBM Intros New 560 Express Power Systems, Beefs Up i Editions

IBM has announced upgrades to its Power Systems lineup, the all-new Power 560 Express, a variety of software enhancements, and a heckuva lot of data that supports IBM's performance lead over Unix systems from rivals HP and Sun. Although the announcement made yesterday focused primarily on Power Systems that will now ship with double the number of cores in the same footprints, along with sys admin solutions most appealing to AIX users, IBM i made some gains.

Scott Handy, vice president of worldwide marketing and strategy for IBM Power Systems, delivered the announcement to the media via a webcast. He was obviously stoked about the new performance improvements, etc, and although his focus was undeniably on the hotly contested Unix market where IBM snagged 1,200 clients from HP and Sun in the last two years, he did include IBM i where it plays.

Handy showed a pie graph that reveals the market spend of the various operating systems that Power Systems covers--48 percent of the market for client spending on servers. Of that, Unix covers about 30 percent with Linux covering about 12-14 percent or so. On the graph, the i portion looked like a sliver of market-share spend.

"And then i is just a critical component to us as well . . . proportionally it is actually bigger than this chart would look because we happen to have 100 percent of the i market, which is not true for Unix and Linux, but that's an incredibly strategic part of our platform for us going forward, and this i customer base is incredibly loyal," Handy said, noting that he was delivering the webcast from Rochester, Minnesota, where the Large User Group (LUG) was meeting with IBM.

The New Power 560

Most notably, IBM introduced the new Power 560, which fits between the Power 520 and 570. The Power 560 features 4-, 8-, and 16-core configurations running 3.6 GHz POWER6 processors, and IBM says it's designed to help businesses consolidate multiple UNIX, i, or x86 workloads onto fewer footprints. The Power 560 also lets customers add capacity with modular building blocks, and more important, it offers some compelling upgrade paths to i customers currently on the 4-core 520 and 8-core 550 rather than requiring a bigger leap up to a 570.

IBM also added new options to the Power 520 Express and Power 550 Express, providing new 4- and 8-core options for i editions. Plus, AIX and Linux users can now add i on the same system.

"We doubled the headroom in our low-end i models, which the i customers will be very excited about," he said, referring to the improvements in the 520. "Now they can have four cores, same as AIX and Linux customers now. And then the 550 also doubled."

Previously AIX and Linux customers could go up to 8 cores, but the i was limited to 4 cores.

"Now all servers within the Power line have the same speeds, feeds, and options for AIX, Linux, and i across our product line, and the i customers I've talked to are very happy about that," he said.

On the BladeCenter front, the JS12 blade server running on IBM BladeCenter can now be pre-installed with i and attached to IBM's DS3200 storage to create a SAN. So basically, a customer can order a BladeCenter S with IBM i pre-installed.

IBM also beefed up the Power 570, which now ranges from 2 to 32 cores and can feature the fastest POWER6 processors (4.4 GHz and 5.0 GHz) that were previously available only in the top of the line Power 595.

The new systems will be available November 21.

In addition, IBM announced some updates to virtualization, energy management, and availability software, though the PowerVM and IBM Systems Director enhancements seem to be geared more for organizations that are running AIX with i and Linux than traditional i-focused organizations. IBM introduced:

• A beta version of PowerVM Active Memory Sharing, new virtualization software that helps clients improve memory utilization by pooling resources between partitions.
• IBM Systems Director, a new foundation for enterprise platform management, spanning multiple platforms and operating environments. Systems Director helps clients deploy, monitor, analyze, optimize and update Power server and storage physical and virtual resources running any combination of AIX, i, or Linux workloads. Systems Director is managed through an intuitive graphical interface and provides upward integration to enterprise service-management tools, including IBM Tivoli.
• A new version of Active Energy Manager, an extension to IBM Systems Director, featuring advanced energy control options designed to boost performance per watt by slowing processor clock speed or even putting processors in "nap" mode when not in use. It also lets users set an energy cap a for a single POWER6 server or even across a pool of POWER6-based servers.
• A new release of IBM iCluster, a high-availability solution based on logical replication, that integrates with IBM i service- and fix-management tools.
• A new distribution agreement with Vision Solutions for IBM to distribute Vision Cluster1, Vision's flagship enterprise cluster management solution for IBM i. (Vision previously announced this agreement October 1, and IBM had it available to order as of September 9.)
• New and updated Rational software for the i operating environment that helps geographically-distributed software delivery teams collaborate.

For more details, IBM's Power Systems site has links to all the relevant servers and software, including pricing, and if you want to geek out on all the performance improvements over the Unix competition, the official press release is packed with them.

Posted by cmaxcer at October 8, 2008 10:44 AM