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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More than 1800 users of competitive hardware have eliminated server farms by migrating to Power Systems over the past three years.
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Competitor Claims
Highlights
IBM POWER6™ is the fastest processor in the industry
IBM Power Systems™ offers servers designed for high transaction rate database applications and highly virtualized and consolidated application environments with significant demand on the total system design.
Unlike Power Systems, Xeon systems do not have the memory capacity, memory bandwidth, I/O bandwidth, or cache that is included in the Power Systems design in order to support demanding environments.
Power also provides scalability and availability features not offered in Xeon systems.
When Intel introduced the Xeon 5500 family of Nehalem processors, it provided comparisons to Power servers proclaiming the readiness of Xeon to replace RISC systems. This document addresses these claims.
Check out these facts that make Power clients and prospects a target:
- IBM Power Systems has a long history of leadership performance with a solid track record for delivering innovation as scheduled on its technology roadmap
- IBM is the only major vendor to gain revenue share in the UNIX® segment for the past five years.1
- IBM has helped nearly 1,600 customers migrate from Sun, HP and other UNIX platforms to IBM AIX® or Linux® on Power.2
UNIX Server Rolling Four Quarter Average Revenue Share: According to IDC
Intel Claim: Xeon has up to 2.45 times the performance
FACT: All recent Intel comparisons were made to the IBM Power® 570 with 4.70GHz processors, announced in May 2007. On April 28, 2009 IBM announced that these processors were withdrawn from marketing, since faster processors were announced for the Power 570 in October 2008.
Power 570 demonstrated 28% more performance per core than HP ProLiant DL370 G6.
FACT: The IBM Power 570 demonstrated 28% more performance per core than the HP ProLiant DL370 G6 in the most demanding benchmark run on both the Xeon 5500 servers and POWER6, TPC-C.3
Intel Claim: Companies can run their largest applications on Xeon platforms with Windows or Linux.
FACT: The Power 570 server scaled to more than 2½ times the systems throughput of the Xeon system for TPC-C. That system introduced in May 2007 had a maximum of 16-processor cores. Today the Power 570 has 32-core Power 570 servers with even more scalability and capacity. In addition, the IBM Power 595 provides more than nine and a half times the throughput of the any Xeon 5500 system — and more than five times the throughput of the Xeon system.3 The IBM System x3950 M2 has a result of over 1.2 million transactions per minute which is 75% higher than the next best reported result on a Xeon system, also an IBM System. The IBM Power 595 had a result of over 6 million transactions per minute.
Power Systems scale to more than 5 times systems throughput of the best Xeon system for TPC-C
There is more to performance and scalability than benchmark results. As consolidation through virtualization becomes more important to reduce costs by improving system utilization, other systems attributes can also increase in importance.
The following table compares an 8-core Xeon system to an 8-core Power offering.4
Comparison of 8-core Xeon system to 8-core Power offerings
With more than eight times the cache, three times the memory bandwidth, 1.7 times the memory and more I/O bandwidth per core, the IBM Power 550 is appropriately targeted at highly virtualized environments.
Running high transaction rates and highly virtualized environments also increases the impact of outages. The disruption caused by any outage and the associated cost is much higher when there is a large database to recover or there are many users attached to the system.
Power provides a comprehensive set of features to increase availability including First Failure Data Capture, Instruction Retry, Alternate Processor Recovery, Bit Steering (memory), I/O Extended Error Handling, Partition Availability priority and Live Application Mobility. None of these features are available in Xeon systems. It is no wonder that a Yankee Group study showed AIX systems having almost 15 times less downtime than Windows systems.5
AIX Systems have 1/15 the Downtime of Windows
Intel Claim: Xeon is less than 1/10 the price of Power.
FACT: It is not surprising that Intel would discover a large price difference between a system that can scale to 8-sockets and supports a large memory and I/O infrastructure and a 2-socket system with limited configurability.
The result is quite different when more similar systems are compared. For example, a single IBM BladeCenter® JS43 blade with 8-cores and IBM PowerVM™ virtualization included is priced almost the same as an 8-core HP ProLiant BL490c with 8-cores and virtualization.6
List price comparison of 8-core Blade Systems
1 Source: IDC Quarterly Server Tracker Q109 release, May 2009.
2 Source: IBM internal numbers.
3 For complete TPC-C results, go to www.tpc.org (link resides outside of ibm.com) Results compared are shown in the table below.
4 Xeon memory bandwidth per core based on configuration with maximum memory.
5 Source: "UNIX, Linux Uptime and Reliability Increase; Patch Management Woes Plague Windows" © 2008 Yankee Group Research, Inc. All rights reserved
6 All prices are list prices in USD as of May 12, 2009. Prices from resellers may vary. Prices are subject to change without notice. Prices based on a chassis with one blade with 64GB of memory.
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