IBM Delivers Unprecedented 256-core Unix Server

To further strengthen its grip in the $13 billion Unix market, IBM (News - Alert) has launched a new Power7 based Unix server with unprecedented energy efficiency. Aimed at firms running large scale database applications or planning to consolidate multiple Unix or Linux workloads onto a single system using virtual software PowerVM, the new 256-core IBM Power 795 offers more than five times better energy efficiency compared to servers from Oracle (News - Alert) and Hewlett-Packard, according to IBM.

Concurrently, IBM also unveiled few low-end Power7-based servers with one or two processors. All the new servers released today support Linux or IBM’s AIX or i operating systems.

Furthermore, said IBM, the new Power7 based Unix server offers the industry's highest ever TPC-C (transaction processing) benchmark using a Power Systems configuration with DB2 database software, hitting more than 10 million (10,366,254 ) transactions per minute, which beat HP's best result by more than 2.5 times and Oracle's best by more than 35 percent, claims IBM. The IBM result represents 2.7 times better performance per core than the Oracle result, 41 percent better price performance, and 35 percent better energy efficiency per transaction. HP's best result is over twice as expensive per transaction as the IBM result, added IBM.

Employing IBM's leading-edge EnergyScale technology that varies frequencies depending upon workloads, the new system supports up to 8 terabytes (TB) of memory and provides over four times the performance in the same energy envelope as the fastest Power 595 IBM Power6 processor-based high-end system. Plus, it uses eight processor books, each book comprising four Power7 cores.

With 256 cores running at 4 GHz, the new POWER7 technology supports four times as many processor cores as prior systems and uses the latest PowerVM virtualization software to allow customers to run over 1,000 virtual servers on a single physical system, enabling a substantial improvement in operating efficiency, the computer giant said in a statement.  Additionally, for users approaching capacity limits for energy, space and cooling in data centers, consolidating older systems to the new high-end Power 795 could result in more headroom – with energy reductions of up to 75 percent for equivalent performance capacity – allowing for workload growth in existing data centers and helping companies to potentially avoid or reduce the cost of expanding or building new data centers, asserted IBM.

IBM also announced Power Flex, a new environment composed of two or more Power 795 systems, PowerVM Live Partition Mobility and a Flex Capacity Upgrade on Demand option. This solution enables clients to shift running applications from one system to another to perform system maintenance without downtime, helping to balance workloads and more easily handle peaks in demand.  

IBM also announced a new version of IBM's UNIX operating system, AIX 7.