IBM is quite proud of its track record with competitive Unix displacements where it steals customers from Oracle/Sun and HP. In the first quarter of 2010, IBM snagged well over 200 customers that moved critical workloads to IBM servers and storage systems. For the year so far, the updated numbers have risen include 117 from Oracle/Sun and 95 from HP.
Since IBM established its Migration Factory program four years ago to help clients move to IBM systems, nearly 2,700 customers have switched to IBM servers and storage. In fact, according to IBM, its growing Unix market share revenue has risen to around 40 percent while Oracle/Sun and HP have both dropped to below 30 percent each. A decade ago IBM was just a blip in the Unix race. In 2009, IBM's
Migration Factory cranked out 574 migrations to Power Systems.
Meanwhile, all of these numbers just document client wins where "one" is attributed to a client that might actually buy dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of IBM Power Systems.
"While the server gets the focal point because it's something physical, the battle is also over virtualization -- how clients are going to do server consolidation, how they are going to architect their data centers," Ross Mauri, general manager of IBM Power Systems, told Power IT Pro.
"When you see the numbers we publish, the number of clients we migrate through our Migration Factory, the average number of servers is somewhere between 10 and 50. There are some where it's been 1,000-to-2,000 servers, and those just count as one client," he explained, noting that he's not aware of the exact average but it's still usually a server consolidation play that lets companies reduce many Oracle/Sun or HP servers down to one or a handful of Power Systems.
"Virtualization is a huge part of it because that's a discussion about how secure the virtualization is, what agility it will give the client, and what management processes, techniques, and tools will be deployed. It's usually a much bigger discussion than a 1-for-1 server -- it's almost always a server consolidation play," Mauri said.
POWER7 Rising
IBM's new POWER7-based systems are looking to be all-around winners, too, generally boasting four times the energy efficiency of previous POWER6-based systems with twice the performance offered at the same basic cost.
In IBM's latest quarterly financial report earlier this month, IBM CFO Mark Loughridge told investors that IBM expects to further extend its price/performance advantage in the UNIX space. "We expect our share gains to continue in the high-end when we announce our new POWER 7 products later this year," he said.
IBM will round out the high-end with an upgrade path from the current IBM Power 595 server as a simple replacement of the processor books and two system controllers with new POWER7 components, within the existing system frame. The high-end POWER7 server will boast up to 256 POWER7 processor cores, and it'll be designed to operate within the same energy envelope of the current 64-core Power 595 server, as well as offer a high-voltage DC power option. Plus, for easier upgrades, enterprises with multiple systems leveraging PowerVM Live Partition Mobility may use this function to maintain application availability during the upgrade process.
New Entry Models on the Way, Too
In the second half of 2010, IBM is expected to announce four different models to cover the lower end of its Power Systems line, updating what is essentially the current set of "520" class servers. The models are currently in testing and are designed to fill a wide range of granularity for customer needs. Some customers will also be able to retain their serial numbers via an upgrade.