Today IBM announced the expected, but welcome, expansion of its new POWER7 lineup with a new record-breaking high-end and four new low-end models, which rounds out POWER7 offerings to fully complement POWER6 users wanting to migrate. "IBM has now rolled out the full POWER7 portfolio," said IBM's Ian Jarman, manager of Power Systems software, including AIX, IBM i, and Linux. The new models—which include four Express systems aimed at mid-market customers—deliver significantly better performance, with higher energy efficiency, than their POWER6 counterparts. According to IBM, POWER7's new high-end eclipses the speed and green profiles of competing systems from HP and Oracle.

The POWER7 45-nanometer chip architecture, first announced in February 2010, supports twice the processor cores and memory capacity of POWER6. POWER7's version of PowerVM now enables up to 1,000 virtual servers on a single high-end host. Other POWER7 innovations include Micro Partitioning, TurboCore, and VMControl. POWER7's energy efficiencies maintain across the new models, with up to a 75 percent energy reduction for equivalent performance on new models. All models support IBM's EnergyScale technology, which varies CPU clock speeds, and thus power consumption, to meet a specified performance or energy consumption objective.

Naturally, these improvements are welcome to budget-crunched low- and mid-range AIX, IBM i, and Linux system users. Jarman points out that dramatic hardware cost reductions being driven by *nix and x86 markets are now accessible to all POWER-class customers, with CPU, memory, and storage capacity all cost-competitive with comparable products from other enterprise server manufacturers, particularly HP and Oracle.

Today's announcement includes the high-end 256-core, 8-terabyte memory Power 795, which jumps performance four-fold from the fastest POWER6 system, the Power 595. IBM also announced a new high-end HA model for Power 795 systems, termed Power Flex, which teams two Power 795's while enabling live migration via Live Partition Mobility, and dynamic memory and CPU capacity upgrades via a Flex Capacity Upgrade on Demand option.

IBM quotes SPECint_rate 2006 benchmark peak performance result of 11,200 on a Power 795 with 256 cores and 32 processors, with four threads per core. This is more than eight times Oracle's published Sun SPARC Enterprise M9000, the closest competitor that also maxes out at 256 cores but has 64 processors with two threads per core. HP's lower-ceiling SuperDome, with only 128 cores across 64 processors and one thread per core, maxed out at 1,648. Topping those benchmarks is a just-completed TPC-C DB2 performance test that exceeded 10.3 million transactions per minute (10,366,254 to be precise), besting HP by 153 percent and Oracle by 35 percent. IBM says POWER7 achieves 2.7 times better performance per core than Oracle's Sun platform at a 40 percent cost savings.

But mid-market AIX customers are more interested in the new Express Server models, the Power 710, 720, 730, and 740, which have an entry-level pricing below $6,500, which includes a single quad-core CPU, 8GB memory and a pair of 76GB drives to get you up and running (but excludes AIX license fees). The model specs are:

IBM activates half the cores of each system in each base-price system; customers can activate additional cores for a fee to boost performance at a later date. As with POWER6, customers are not limited to AIX as the sole operating system: all POWER7 systems, including previously announced BladeCenter servers, can run any mix of AIX, IBM i, and Linux, via IBM's optional PowerVM hypervisor. Express models support PowerVM Express Edition, which enables up to three logical partitions with per-server resource allocation as fine as one tenth of a CPU. And as with POWER6 systems, POWER7 Express users can purchase the PowerVM Lx86 feature to install and run most 32-bit x86 Linux applications.

Due to POWER7's significant price/performance advantage, Jarman believes many AIX shops will find upgrading very cost effective. Existing POWER6 customers, for example, will likely find the 720 Express an attractive entry point owing to its drawer-expansion capability.

Along with the POWER7 hardware announcements, IBM announced several packaged systems, including the Smart Analytics System 7700, which bundles a 740 Express with IBM DB2, InfoSphere Warehouse, and AIX, to provide an all-in-one business intelligence analytics engine. For AIX software development tasks, IBM now offers its Rational Power Appliance, a family of software appliances based on Power Express platforms preloaded with IBM Rational AIX development tools. Other packages include IBM Business Partner integration offerings from Infor, JD Edwards, Lawson, and SAP, which combine vertical applications with POWER7 Express hardware.