IBM Power7 systems

The IBM Power7 systems are designed to manage demanding emerging applications, from smart electrical grids to real-time analytics for financial markets, and have increased capabilities in virtualisation, energy savings and cost-efficient use of memory.

The systems can manage millions of transactions in real time and analyse the associated volumes of data of emerging applications.

The systems and management software include:

Power 780 scalable, high-end servers, with modular design and up to 64 Power7 cores, or CPUs. The included TurboCore workload optimising mode can deliver up to twice the performance per core of Power6 processor-based systems, and is suitable for high per-core performance requirements, such as managing and analysing transactions from a smart electrical grid.

The Power 770 modular enterprise system with up to 64 cores and higher performance per core than Power6 processors. It uses up to 70% less energy for the same number of cores as the IBM Power 570.

The Power 755 high-performance computing cluster node with 32 cores is Energy Star qualified for energy efficiency and optimised for high analytic workloads.

Power 750 Express is an Energy Star qualified business server for mid-market clients with four times the processing capacity of the IBM Power 550 Express, in the same energy envelope. It is claimed to give 10 times the performance of an HP Integrity rx6600 and to be three times more energy efficient than the Sun Sparc Enterprise T5440.

Systems Director Express, standard and enterprise editions, offers simplified packaging of management software for the new systems. It includes the virtualisation management capabilities of VMControl, which allows a ‘systems pool’ of multiple power servers to be managed as one entity.

The systems’ parallel processing, ‘throughput’ computing and analytics capabilities are all integrated and managed with IBM Systems Director software. The overall system can then manage other systems, storage and networking on Power6 and Power7 systems, and also IBM mainframes and x86-based System x servers, and provides a complete management framework, including the virtualisation management of VMControl.

Parallel processing capabilities have been increased for WebSphere, DB2, InfoSphere Warehouse and Cognos.