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New IBM Power7 Blades, Systems Software, Services Cut IT Costs, Pave Way for New Workloads  

 POWER7 Sets New Benchmark Record; Cuts Software Licensing by up to 80%

ARMONK, NY, April 13 2010 – IBM today added new servers, services and software to its lineup of 2010 systems designed to put a lid on the rising costs and complexities of operating modern data centers. The new offerings help clients reap the benefits of IBM’s three-year, $3 billion investment in Power7 systems that are ready for new workloads, such as the growing use of powerful, real-time business analytics.

They include new blade servers built on IBM's record-setting POWER7 technology; new systems software that reduces the deployment of new workloads from weeks to minutes; and new services to remotely implement the new systems, reducing installation costs by up to 25%.

IBM also announced its Power7 technology achieved record performance for a range of workloads.

New Power7 Blades, Systems Software, Services: Improved Performance, Reduced Data Center Costs

With four, eight or 16 cores per blade, the new servers offer clients the same 64-core POWER technology at work in some of the world’s most critical data centers in government, research, finance and high-tech industries among others.
Built on the proven foundation of the IBM BladeCenter® family of products, the PS700, PS701 and PS702 Express are the premier blades for 64-bit applications. The POWER7 processor’s innovative technologies automatically optimize the blades’ performance and energy efficiency, allowing the new BladeCenter PS702 Express to deliver 225% better performance per blade than the Oracle Sun Blade T6340, and 288% greater performance per blade than the HP Integrity BL860c Blade. (5)

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, new workloads can be deployed in minutes, down from weeks and server administration costs can be reduced up to 21%.  A new version of IBM Systems Director VM Control -- which manages multiple virtualized and physical systems from a single interface -- can improve staff productivity by up to 40%. IBM Active Energy Manager 4.3 monitors and manages energy use and can reduce systems administrative and energy costs by nearly 30% by virtually moving workloads to under- utilized systems or scheduling non-priority workloads to off-peak hours.

For more information on new IBM Systems Director, VM Control and Active Energy Manager offerings, go to: 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 (shaves up to 25% from installation costs) to install and implement IBM systems. 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.

For more information go to:

http://www-03.ibm.com/financing/us/lifecycle/acquire/powerx.html

IBM also announced today a new exchange program to upgrade to POWER 7 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 POWER 6 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 go to:

www-03.ibm.com/financing/us/lifecycle/acquire/powerx.html

POWER7 Sets New Benchmark Records with Performance that Can Slash Licensing Costs More Than 80%

IBM’s Power 780 system today demonstrated POWER7’s ability to deliver optimal performance across a variety of workloads by setting new records across the industry’s major benchmarks. Overall, the Power 780 delivered more than four times the performance-per-core of any HP Itanium or Sun SPARC system and nearly 1.5-times the performance-per-core of any Intel x86-based system capable of scaling beyond 32 processor cores. (1)

-- For businesses that run SAP, Power 780 handled 37,000 users on 64 cores – 16% more users than a 256-core Sun Enterprise M9000 and 130% more users than a 64-core Fujitsu system running Intel Xeon® X7560 chips. (2)

-- The Power 780 also demonstrated the ability to deliver leadership, 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 three-times the performance of all other competitive published eight-socket results. (3)

-- The Power 780 also delivers unprecedented price for performance on transaction-processing workloads.  The first server to deliver more than 1.2 million transactions per minute for less than 75-cents per transaction, the Power 780 delivers the performance and scalability of large systems for the cost of a small system. The 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 (4).

This performance leadership across all major workloads, combined with Power systems’ built-in virtualization technology means clients can achieve dramatic cost savings and efficiency in their IT centers.

-- The Power 780 uses up to 87% fewer cores than a Sun SPARC Enterprise Cluster to deliver over one million transactions per minute enabling clients to slash database licensing and maintenance costs by 80%.  The Power 780 is 3.4 times more energy-efficient. (5)

-- IBM Power systems also demonstrate the value of built-in, virtualization without limits. A new IBM whitepaper indicates clients deploying virtualization may see up to 65% more performance per virtual machine on a Power 750 running PowerVM than a similarly configured HP DL380 G6 running VMware.  And PowerVM provides the ability to scale virtual machines to the full capacity of the system – up to eight-times more than VMware.  (6)

POWER7’s unmatched efficiency comes from IBM’s ability to put 64 of the world’s most powerful computing processors, or "cores," at the full disposal of IT managers, while other computing architectures struggle to efficiently harness 16 or 32 processor cores.  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.