Compare UNIX Servers

Today's POWER6® and POWER7® systems combine industry-leading performance, scalability and modularity to enable you to get the most from your investment and build a flexible, responsive infrastructure that easily adapts and grows based on your business needs. With a virtualization hypervisor built into every Power System, all performance benchmarks are achieved in a virtualized environment, unlike competitive systems that can be subject to lower performance when using third-party virtualization software.

Deploying Power Systems Software™ technologies enables businesses to fully exploit Power Systems™ servers. Realize the benefits of leadership IBM PowerVM™ virtualization with AIX®, i and Linux® operating systems on a single server—as well as IBM PowerHA™ for availability, and IBM Systems Director for energy, security and platform management.

POWER7® processor-based systems—the first generation of systems built for a smarter planet—offer balanced systems designs that automatically optimize workload performance and capacity and either a system or virtual machine level. Features include:

• TurboCore™ for maximum per core performance for databases
• MaxCore for incredible parallelization and high capacity throughput
• Intelligent threading technology to utilize more threads when workloads benefit
• Intelligent Cache technology to optimize cache utilization, flowing it from core to core
• Intelligent Energy to maximize performance dynamically when thermal conditions allow
• Active Memory™ Expansion provides more memory for SAP

POWER6® processor-based systems provide outstanding performance per processor core, range of scalability and the ability to incrementally and linearly add performance and capacity.

As businesses look for ways to maximize their IT infrastructure investment returns, they turn to PowerVM™ virtualization to consolidate multiple workloads onto fewer systems—increasing server utilization and reducing cost. PowerVM provides a secure and scalable virtualization environment for AIX®, i and Linux® applications built upon the advanced resiliency features and leading performance of the Power Systems™ platform.

PowerVM offers Micro-Partitioning™ with the ability to run up to 10 partitions per processor core, and dynamically move processor, memory, and I/O resources between partitions to support changing workload requirements. PowerVM Live Partition Mobility enables active partitions to be moved between servers, virtually eliminating planned downtime. Live partition mobility can also be used to upgrade workloads between POWER6® and POWER7® processor-based servers without an application outage.

VMControl™ complements PowerVM by providing automated virtualization management that minimizes time to provision virtual machine images and enables management of system pools. With POWER7, PowerVM and VMControl virtualization software will support up to 1,000 virtual machines on a single system, providing massive consolidation capability for exceptional costs savings.

Power Systems™ energy management solutions monitor and control energy usage to help you manage energy efficiency in your data center. Each Power server has EnergyScale™ technology built into the POWER6® and POWER7® processor. Through consolidation and virtualization with PowerVM™, businesses have realized dramatic energy savings. And, with IBM Systems Director Active Energy Manager™, you can identify trends in your energy usage and thermal profile, turn off processor cores or limit the energy draw across one or a group of Power servers, and track environmental data from applications used to monitor air conditioning units, Uninterruptible Power Supplies and Intelligent Power Distribution Units.

Power Systems™ solutions benefit from decades of IBM experience in designing and deploying high availability hardware and software. PowerHA™ SystemMirror disk clustering solutions are available to help keep your systems—and your business—running 24x7x365.

PowerHA SystemMirror for AIX® and IBM i Editions are data center and multisite resiliency solutions designed to help protect critical business applications from outages: planned or unplanned. PowerHA is integrated with cluster aware capabilities in both the AIX and IBM i operating environments. PowerHA pureScale™ technology delivers levels of database scalability and availability unmatched on UNIX® or x86 systems, and is offered as a component of DB2 pureScale. Tivoli Systems Automation for Multiplatforms offers powerful high availability options for Linux on Power Systems.

With platform management technologies on Power Systems™, businesses not only get a complete picture of their systems and how well they are operating, but also the tools to deploy, optimize and maintain these systems at maximum effectiveness and efficiency. The result is optimized workload performance, energy efficiency and cost control. On Power Systems, server virtualization management is integrated with network and storage management for complete resource control.

IBM System Director Editions for Power are sized for every data center. It’s now simpler than ever for a single operator to manage both physical assets and virtual resources. With IBM Systems Director for platform management and Tivoli® for enterprise service management solutions, Power Systems offer a unified systems management solution that can improve service delivery. VMControl™ provides automated virtualization management and minimizes the time it takes to provision virtual images and manage system pools.

IBM offers tools to protect data from threats and unauthorized access on Power servers running AIX, i and Linux workloads. Data encryption capabilities to protect file systems, data and backup are an integral part of the AIX and IBM i operating systems, both of which also support role-based access control. Whether you want to manage the security of your Power servers, or include other elements in your infrastructure—IBM solutions provide intuitive administration that helps you to define, enforce and audit your business security policy.

Whether you’re looking for traditional solutions such as ERP and transaction processing or solutions for a smarter planet requiring massive scaling and analytics, IBM and IBM Business Partner solutions help you keep an eye on tomorrow while making sure current operations don't miss a beat. Designed from conception for optimal performance, scalability and quick time-to-value, your IT shop can benefit from pre-integration of the operating system and IBM and ISV software and often, pre-installation on Power Systems.