IBM Power Moves

IBM Corp. unveiled a three-prong Power strategy with accompanying products. On the software side IBM announced a new virtualization brand, PowerVM, with a set of initial offerings and a new version of i5/OS that runs on a blade server. The company also announced a number of Power6 servers.

Focal Points

• IBM disclosed its new PowerVM virtualization brand that is designed to unify its i5/OS, Linux (Power and x86), and Unix virtualization software offerings under a single brand. There are three different PowerVM offerings – express, standard, and enterprise. All three editions offer virtualization management, a virtual I/O server (VIOS), x86 Linux support, and shared dedicated capacity. On the System p 520 and 550 up to three LPARs per server are supported whereas on the Power 5 and Power6 BladeCenter JS21 and JS22 servers up to 10 LPARs per core can exist. The standard and enterprise editions offer multiple shared processor pools on the Power6 JS21 and JS22, while the enterprise edition also supports live partition mobility on the Power6 JS22. Officials also stated IBM Systems Director is available for Power, including Active Energy Manager v3.1 to monitor system health and control energy consumption.
• IBM revealed the System p 520 Express, p 550 Express, and the BladeCenter JS22 with two BladeCenter S options, a rack and a tower. The new p 520 Express has 4.2 GHz Power6 processor with one, two, or four cores and up to 64 GBs of memory. It is available in a 4U rack or tower and offers 36 percent more performance/watt than a Power5, according to IBM. The new p 550 Express has 3.5 and 4.2 GHz processor options with two, four, six, or eight Power6 cores in a 4U footprint and up to 256 GBs of memory. The BladeCenter JS22 is a four core, 4.0 GHz Power6 processor-based blade that supports from 2GB to 32 GB of memory, has two 1 GB Ethernet ports and two expansion cards, and has one disk drive. The new servers will run AIX, Linux on Power, and Linux on x86 applications. IBM also announced the IBM x86 Server Consolidation Factory on Power systems to help customers consolidate x86 server workloads onto Power systems.
• IBM is now making i5/OS available on a blade server, the BladeCenter JS22. i5/OS v6r1 can run in the same BladeCenter along with AIX, Linux, and Microsoft Corp. Windows applications. i5/OS on the JS22 uses PowerVM Standard Edition which provides POWER hypervisor, micro-partitioning, VIOS with Integrated Virtualization Manager, and virtual LAN features. The i5/OS operating system uses the VIOS partition for access to BladeCenter resources and attached storage devices.

Experton Group believes there is a shift in momentum towards Unix platform providers, as enterprises look for servers that they can consolidate and virtualize business critical applications on economically. IBM and its enterprise server competitors are adding to their array of hardware and software features that will convince executives that these processors have the attributes needed to achieve their energy consumption, management, performance, and workload balancing demands. IT executives should remain on top of the advances in enterprise server and virtualization technologies and ensure that application and infrastructure architects are focusing on solving data center issues as well as their own user requirements.