Move Up to IBM Power Systems

IT managers have to grapple with the issue of server sprawl and the accompanying high cost of management combined with the explosion in energy use in the datacenter. One solution that many clients are implementing is server consolidation. The IBM Power™ 595 server, exploiting IBM PowerVM™ technology, is the epitome of a consolidation server because of its outstanding performance and capacity.

With the fastest processor in the industry, the 5.00GHz POWER6 processor, and outstanding memory and I/O bandwidth, the Power 595 has the capacity to support huge consolidation efforts that other servers just can't handle.

We ran a variety of benchmarks, and the answer is the same for all of them. The 64-core IBM Power™ 595 server outperforms the 128-core HP Integrity Superdome. – more performance with ½ the cores. The 595 also has 90% of the performance of the 256 Sun SPARC Enterprise M9000 – 90% of the performance with ¼ the cores.

The Power 595 server can offer you this fabulous performance for your UNIX® applications.

The 64-core Power 595 server outperformed the 64-core HP Integrity Superdome server by at least 2 ½ to 1 and the 64-core Sun SPARC Enterprise M9000 server by over 3 to 1 on processor intensive benchmarks. Even when the Superdome and M9000 servers were tested with twice the number of cores, the Power 595 server was faster by 18% up to as much as 71%. 71% faster than a system with double the cores is a very impressive result, but that is what you can expect form the IBM Power 595 server, very impressive results.

These benchmarks show the outstanding systems performance of the Power 595, but sometimes overall systems performance is not the most important factor, especially in a consolidated environment. Some applications are more bound by memory constraints, either based on the quantity of memory available or the memory bandwidth. Others are constrained by I/O bandwidth. When we compare those characteristics, the Power 595 is equally impressive.

Besides delivering two times the processor performance per core, the Power 595 also supports 4 times the memory per core, over 3 ½ times the memory bandwidth per core and over 5 times the I/O bandwidth per core of the Integrity Superdome and the M9000 highend systems. The tremendous capacity of the IBM Power 595 server can help you run challenging applications in every partition.

The Power 595 server is the fastest system with the fastest processor, the most memory capability, and I/O bandwidth. It is no wonder that it is a prime target for highly consolidated environments.

Compare midrange servers

The workhorse UNIX® database and application servers have to deliver cost effective, reliable performance for mission-critical applications. Using advanced features like virtualization, IBM POWER6™ processor performance, and mainframe-inspired reliability, availability, and serviceability (RAS) characteristics, the IBM Power™ 570 server epitomizes what today's midrange server should be.

The POWER6 processor technology and advanced system design of the Power 570 server create a system with leadership-balanced performance. The very fast processor, up to 5.00 GHz, with system bus, I/O bandwidth, and large memory capacity that grows with the number of processors leads to the astounding performance proven by the number of leadership commercial and technical benchmarks.

The result is the very best performance for a midrange server, and the very best performance per core of a midrange server.

We compare performance because the exceptional speed of the Power 570 system is what allows you to meet your end user's service level objectives. And this is designed to be done with fewer cores which helps drive down your cost and improve system manageability.

The following table summarizes the best midrange server performance result for the IBM Power 570 server versus Sun and HP 32-core and 64-core midrange UNIX servers. The results show that the Power 570 server has the very best performance of any midrange server.

The Power 570 server leads competitive midrange systems in capacity by far. However that is only one measure of performance. Better performance per core helps drive cost savings in hardware acquisition, software licensing, and a variety of operational areas. The following table shows the Power 570 server performance per core compared to Sun and HP midrange servers.

With performance per core more than double the midrange competitors, the Power 570 server can enable you to reduce the number of servers and/or the size of servers you require to do your production. Consolidation using the PowerVM™ feature of the Power 570 server can also help you increase the utilization of your servers which could enable you to even further reduce servers.  

Processing power is not the only resource required by applications. So other resource is also required for consolidation. The 570 has that resource. On a per-core basis, the 5.00 GHz 16-core 570 has three times the memory, over seven times the memory bandwidth, and more than two times the I/O bandwidth of HP, and four times the memory, over 5 times the memory bandwidth, and over four times the I/O bandwidth of Sun.  The 4.20GHz 32-core Power 570, optimized for space and energy efficiency, still has more capacity per core than the rx8640 and M8000.

This combination of more performance per core and more I/O and memory capacity and bandwidth per core could allow you to reduce the number of servers or the number of cores per server. This could have a major impact on lowering your cost of server acquisition and your total cost of ownership for your IT environment.

The midrange also has systems with less configuration and performance capability. The Power 560 Express has the same advantages in this space as the Power 570 has in its space with 45 to 80% performance advantage versus HP systems with the same number of cores and 17 to 37% performance advantage versus Sun systems that have twice the number of cores. The 560 Express also has tremendous advantage in bandwidth with 8 times the memory bandwidth of the HP Integrity rx7640 and the Sun SPARC Enterprise M5000.

The IBM Power Systems midrange servers are designed to support today’s data center. They have the performance, capacity, and bandwidth to support multi-application consolidated environments to help you control cost of operation and acquisition of your environment.

Compare Entry Servers

As entry servers become faster, more customers find them the right performance for mission-critical applications. They also are often the right servers for distributed applications in stores and branch banks. The same POWER6 technology that makes the Power 570 the fastest midrange server helps make the IBM Power 550 Express system the fastest UNIX entry server. The comparison to the 8-core HP Integrity rx6600 and the 16-core Sun SPARC Enterprise M4000 servers help demonstrate this. In fact, the Power 550 Express server has such excellent performance that its result for the demanding TPC-C benchmark is even better than the best HP 9000 Superdome result ever posted. ⁹

The advantage of the Power 550 Express server is even more evident when you look at performance per core.

Like its highend and midrange counterparts, the Power 550 Express also has significantly greater memory and I/O bandwidth per core than the HP and Sun systems. The 550 is also designed to support consolidated environments.

Compare Blade Servers

Blade servers have become increasing popular because of their outstanding performance efficiency. Performance per rack unit (u) and performance per WATT advantage of blades has caused a movement from rack servers to blades. The performance of POWER6 processors has helped the IBM BladeCenter JS22 to be the leader among RISC and Itanium blade servers in these metrics.

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