POWER7 sets new benchmark records while promising to dramatically reduce the cost of processing.
IBM has announced that it has added new servers, services and software to its lineup of 2010 systems designed to help cap the rising costs and complexities of operating modern data centers. The new offerings are expected to help clients reap significant benefits from IBM’s three-year, $3-billion investment in POWER7 systems. The systems have been designed for new workloads, such as the growing use of powerful, real-time business analytics.
Included in the lineup are 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 systems thereby reducing costs by up to 25 percent.
IBM also announced that its POWER7 technology has achieved record performance for a range of workloads.
POWER7 Blades, Systems Software, Services
With four, eight or 16 cores per blade, the new POWER7 servers offer clients the same 64-bit POWER technology that is at work in some of the world’s most critical data centers within government, research, finance and high-tech. Built on the proven foundation of the IBM BladeCenter family of products, the systems are designed for mid-size businesses that need enhanced performance to manage growth and reduce complexity.
The new PS700, PS701 and PS702 Express are the premier blades for workloads ranging from web-tier and SAP application servers to distributed databases within blade-based data centers, according to the company. POWER7’s innovative technologies automatically optimize the blades’ performance and energy efficiency, allowing the new BladeCenter PS702 Express to deliver 225 percent better performance per blade than the Oracle Sun Blade T6340, and 188 percent greater performance per blade than the HP Integrity BL860c Blade. (1)
For more information visit 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 percent, according to IBM. IBM Active Energy Manager 4.3 monitors and manages energy use and can reduce systems energy costs by nearly 30 percent on Power System servers. (2)
For more information on new IBM Systems Director, VM Control and Active Energy Manager offerings, visit 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 to install and implement IBM systems. The remote services can shave up to 25 percent off of installation costs, the company reports. 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.
IBM also announced 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 visit http://www-03.ibm.com/financing/us/lifecycle/acquire/powerx.html
or http://www-03.ibm.com/financing/us/lifecycle/acquire/powerx.html
Eight-Core POWER7 System Boosts Transaction-Processing Performance
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 percent more users than a 256-core Sun Enterprise M9000 and 130 percent 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 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 3 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 percent 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, IBM says. For instance, by using 87 percent 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 percent. (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 a lower cost. AIX Express joins the existing AIX Standard and AIX 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 (SSD) 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 System Mirror 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 a 30 percent improvement in workload productivity. (8) For more information visit
http://www-01.ibm.com/software/rational/announce/power/
For more information on the above new products and to register for a special IBM webcast visit ibm.com/systems.
___________________________________________________________________________
Notes
(1) SPEC and the benchmark names SPECrate, SPECint, and SPECjbb are registered trademarks of the Standard Performance Evaluation Corp. 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 of 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 percent, 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, visit
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.
More than ever, there is a demand for IT to deliver innovation. Your IBM i has been an essential part of your business operations for years. However, your organization may struggle to maintain the current system and implement new projects. The thousands of customers we've worked with and surveyed state that expectations regarding the digital footprint and vision of the company are not aligned with the current IT environment.
TRY the one package that solves all your document design and printing challenges on all your platforms. Produce bar code labels, electronic forms, ad hoc reports, and RFID tags – without programming! MarkMagic is the only document design and print solution that combines report writing, WYSIWYG label and forms design, and conditional printing in one integrated product. Make sure your data survives when catastrophe hits. Request your trial now! Request Now.
Forms of ransomware has been around for over 30 years, and with more and more organizations suffering attacks each year, it continues to endure. What has made ransomware such a durable threat and what is the best way to combat it? In order to prevent ransomware, organizations must first understand how it works.
Disaster protection is vital to every business. Yet, it often consists of patched together procedures that are prone to error. From automatic backups to data encryption to media management, Robot automates the routine (yet often complex) tasks of iSeries backup and recovery, saving you time and money and making the process safer and more reliable. Automate your backups with the Robot Backup and Recovery Solution. Key features include:
Business users want new applications now. Market and regulatory pressures require faster application updates and delivery into production. Your IBM i developers may be approaching retirement, and you see no sure way to fill their positions with experienced developers. In addition, you may be caught between maintaining your existing applications and the uncertainty of moving to something new.
IT managers hoping to find new IBM i talent are discovering that the pool of experienced RPG programmers and operators or administrators with intimate knowledge of the operating system and the applications that run on it is small. This begs the question: How will you manage the platform that supports such a big part of your business? This guide offers strategies and software suggestions to help you plan IT staffing and resources and smooth the transition after your AS/400 talent retires. Read on to learn:
LATEST COMMENTS
MC Press Online