IBM POWER7, scalability and workload balancing for the most demanding applications

IBM unveils new systems based on the POWER7, with technology at 45 nanometers. After the race to the performance and visualization, reach solutions to manage the workload

Paul Degl’Innocenti, Vice President Systems and Technology Group (STG) IBM Italy, has the gift of synthesis when it reviewed the market and strategy of IBM in the server segment: “We have grown quarter over quarter our revenue share and IDC gives us in Italy over 49 percent of market share for our Power Systems. 7 The generation of new processors realize our strategic effort with a commitment in terms of research and development for the limited division TSG has meant an investment of more than three billion dollars “.

If the last two decades of the last century has seen the race performance with strokes of clock frequency and in the last decade, manufacturers have played the card multi-core and virtualization, The next few years will be marked by ‘workload optimization, And more and more customers seek hardware “Fit-for-Purpose”. Systems are then software and services integrated managementOptimized for specific tasks, without losing sight of the scalability to manage growth and complexity of application. Degl’Innocentithe argument thus:”This trend is confirmed by an IBM internal research on 8,000 companies which emerges as the use of different applications together (ERP, BI, BA, Database, Web server) require different forms of exploitation of hardware resources”.
E ‘is the context that sees onset system market POWER7 that the family of IBM STG products were still among the choices of architecture server / storage for a wide range of uses, but are available in every model for specific needs, which also provides a portfolio of storage solutions with integrated software, specifically designed for the cloud, such as the SONAS.

I IBM Systems POWER7 living environment Unix, I for Business, AIX and Linux. The Today’s announcements apply to the renewal of the park from servers Power 550 up, then when are excluded since the new processor families blades. But the systems that make use of new POWER7 can exploit from 4 to 8 cores per socket (each core can handle up to 4 threads at once, for a total of 32 simultaneous tasks) With frequencies from 3 to 4.14 GHz and the third-level cache integrated eDRAM. Cpu with over one billion and 200 million transistors on a chip, with fewer processors than its competitors but ensures that Big Blue is functional in helping to reduce consumption.

The strength of the architecture is clearly generated by the possibility of balancing workloads by using flexible cache, and technology MaxCore and Turbocor (the latter only on Power780, capable of delivering up to twice the performance per core Power6-based systems, shifting resources to only the eight core-core assets) and systems management processes virtualization (PowerVM Active Memory and Expansion to simulate physical memory to an application, SAP also double that installed), while the software Systems Director assumes the role as manager of the three modes of processing (Massive Parallel Processing, ‘throughput’ computing and analysis), in a context that, as a trend, provides for massive computing applications, development services and duties BA does not longer the preserve of different systems, but parallel, with a significant gain in performance (3-4x over Power6 systems).

IBM to stay at home to compare with what we had available before is quickly made: a system IBM Power 770 midrange to 64core POWER7 features performances of two-digit percentage higher than the Power6 processors, and a power consumption by up to 70% lower (for the same core) IBM Power 570 compared to its predecessor.

Power 750 Express and 755 will be available from 19 February 2010 Power 770 and 780 March 16.