IBM Power7 Updates and Improvements – Fourth Quarter 2011

IBM have witnessed a very impressive year so far with regard to the midrange POWER product line.

Market share for IBM POWER in the Unix environment was up 4.3% since the introduction of Power 7 – in a period showing the largest shift of customer spending in Unix history. To date, IBM have published 3,900+ successful migrations to POWER technology, most coming from HP/UX and Oracle/Sun along with some X86 consolidations. Power 7 has been massively successful and in middle of its life cycle, there have been some further announcements made.

New models have been announced. 710 – 740 ranges have been refreshed as well as the 770 and 780 at the higher end. Memory capacity has been doubled and at the top end more cores are available and higher speed processors.

	Power 710 8231-E1C	Power 720 8202-E4C	Power 730 8231-E2C	Power 740 8205-E6C
	IBM’s entry level 2U System now available with up to 128Gb Memory, PCIe Gen2 Low profile capacity to improve throughput & performance.	IBM’s 4U more flexible midrange system more suited to IBM i platform. Now available with up to 256Gb Memory, PCIe Gen2 capacity to improve throughput & performance.	IBM’s High- performance, dense and energy-efficient server. Used for multiple application and infrastructure workloads in virtualised environments. Up to 256Gb Memory	High-performance midsize database and consolidation server. High core counts and expansion capabilities. Ideal for customers forecasting growth. Up to 32 cores and 512Gb memory
Form factor	2U rack	4U rack or tower	2U rack	4U rack (no tower)
# cores	4, 6, 8 one socket	4, 6, 8 one socket	8, 12, 16 two socket	4, 6, 8 one socket 8, 12, 16 two socket
Memory min/max	4/128Gb	4/256Gb 6 or 8 cores 4/64Gb 4 cores	4/256Gb	4/512Gb
PCIe slots	5 PCIe Gen2 Low Profile	5 PCIe Gen2 + 4 PCIe LP Gen2 (opt)	5 PCIe Gen2 Low Profile	5 PCIe Gen2 + 4 PCIe LP Gen2 (opt)
Capacities with expansion	Up to 102 disk bays Up to 5 PCIe slots	Up to 380 disk bays Up to 24 PCIe slots	Up to 378 disk bays Up to 24 PCIe slots	Up to 416 disk bays Up to 45 PCIe slots
Integrated SAS support	RAID 10 RAOD 5/6 (opt)	RAID 10 RAOD 5/6 (opt)	RAID 10 RAOD 5/6 (opt)	RAID 10 RAOD 5/6 (opt)
Standard ethernet	2-port 1Gb Ethernet. No Integrated Virtual Ethernet/Host Ethernet Adapter (IVE/HEA). Requires VIOS for Unix/Linux or IBM i. Virtual Partition Manager
Operating systems	AIX 5.3, 6 & 7 – IBM i 6 & 7 – SUSE – RedHat

The 770 and 780 range

The 770 and 780 range have seen major improvements in I/O bandwidth using PCIe Gen2 adapters. Memory is now expandable to 4Tb, and 4 sockets per node are now available giving you up to 96 cores using the 6 core 3.44GHz processor.

Some of the newly available GEN2 I/O adapters include: