Move Up to IBM Power Systems

Power up - Power6 has 2 to 3 times less performance per core compared to the competition, and is designed to reduce downtime.

IBM POWER6™ processor-based servers are designed to allow you to get the most out of your IT investment. The combination of leadership performance, energy efficiency, flexible virtualization features and RAS features designed to maximize application availability can enable you to take back control of your IT infrastructure.

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Power efficiency: compare mid-range servers

One of the more pressing issues facing datacenter managers today is power usage. The power requirement for datacenters has grown so much that some customers may have to build new facilities because they can't bring enough power into current sites to run their future operations. IBM is approaching this problem with our Big Green initiative.

In the IBM Power™ 570, our EnergyScale™ technology will provide features such as power trending, power-saving, and thermal measurement. These features, enabled via Active Energy Manager under the IBM Director™ console, allows the customer to measure the energy of the system and direct policies toward the energy-efficient operation of the server.

The Power 570 can also be placed in a rack with a Rear Door Heat Exchanger. The IBM Rear Door Heat exchanger is designed to remove heat generated from the back of your computer systems before it enters the room. The efficient IBM Rear Door Heat exchanger, which takes heat from the rack with water, can substantially reduce the heat load coming from any IBM enterprise rack.

Even ignoring the advantages of these features, the Power 570 is very energy efficient as is shown in the following comparison to HP and Sun mid-range servers. The Power 570 is more than 10% better than the HP Integrity rx8640 Server and more than double the Sun SPARC Enterprise M8000 Server in performance per WATT

Performance ¹	SPECint_rate 2006	SSPECfp_rate 2006	SPECjbb 2005
IBM Power 570 ²	478	426.0	691,975
HP Integrity rx8640 ³	416	371.0	NA
Sun Enterprise M8000 ⁴	352	333	440,207

Perf/WATT ⁵	SPECint_rate 2006	SPECfp_rate 2006	SPECjbb 2005
IBM Power 570	0.09	0.08	123.57
HP Integrity rx8640	0.08	0.07	NA
Sun Enterprise M8000	0.03	0.03	41.92

1. Competitive benchmark results reflect results published as of March 31, 2008. Each result is the best performing or best performance per core IBM Power 570, HP Integrity rx8640 or Sun SPARC Enterprise M8000 result. The SPECint_rate2006, SPECfp_rate2006 and SPECjbb2005 results can be found at www.spec.org.

2. SPEC® and the benchmark names SPECrate®, SPECint®, and SPECjbb® are registered trademarks of the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation. Competitive benchmark results stated above reflect results published on www.spec.org as of March 31, 2008. The comparison presented above is based on the best result for the identified systems which were selected for comparison as the best performing systems with a maximum of 32 cores or less from IBM, Sun, and HP respectively. All systems were compared based on maximum processor configuration because that is the data point for which power requirements are defined. Other configurations of these systems could have better performance per WATT metrics. IBM Power 570 results are all for 8 chip (processor), 16 core with two threads per core servers. For the SPECjbb2005 result, the bops/jvm = 86,497.

3. HP Integrity rx8640 results are for 16 chip, 32 core with two threads per core servers. There are no SPECjbb2005 results published for the rx8640.

4. Sun SPARC Enterprise M8000 results are for 16 chip, 32 core with two threads per core servers. For the SPECjbb2005 result, the bops/jvm = 27,513.

5. Performance/WATT is calculated by dividing the performance in the table above by the recommended maximum power usage for site planning. Actual power used by the systems will be less than this value for all of the systems. This information for the Power 570 is in "Model 9117-MMA server specifications" available at http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/eserver/v1r3s/index.jsp. The power requirement for the Power 570 is 5600 WATTs. The information for the rx8640 is in "QuickSpecs HP Integrity rx8640 Server" available at www.hp.com. HP defines multiple maximum power. This calculation uses the Marked Electrical for server which is consistent with the maximum selected for the other servers. The power requirement for the rx8640 is 5400 WATTS. The information for the Sun SPARC Enterprise M8000 Server is in the "Sun SPARC Enterprise M8000/M9000 Servers Site Planning Guide" available at www.sun.com. The power requirement for the M8000 is 10,500 WATTS.

* All statements regarding IBM future directions and intent are subject to change or withdrawal without notice and represent goals and objectives only. Any reliance on these Statements of General Direction is at the relying party's sole risk and will not create liability or obligation for IBM.