IBM Power 780 server

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Highlights

  • Delivers the utmost in infrastructure efficiency at enterprise scale, with flexible delivery models and dynamic resource management that can increase utilisation while reducing operational costs
  • Delivers trusted information across the enterprise, ensuring continuous transaction availability and enabling real time business analytics
  • Provides the highest levels of security, ensuring the integrity of critical information while mitigating risk and meeting regulatory compliance mandates
  • Ideal platform for private cloud deployments.

The planet is getting smaller, flatter and smarter every day. Global market segments are connected like never before. Economic shock waves, both good and bad, travel the globe in nanoseconds. Newer, smarter technologies arrive daily. New business models are born and old ones die, in the blink of an eye. We are in the midst of an important technology shift driving growth and innovation – built on the confluence of big data, cloud, mobile devices and social business. In order to survive businesses need to be flexible, resilient and dedicated to the success of their clients. This era presents a defining moment for businesses to reshape the value they deliver through the customer experience. And the best of these successful businesses have IT infrastructures that consist of enterprise systems that are highly secure and designed for the utmost availability of critical data. They are managed with the maximum cost efficiency and address exponential growth in enterprise data, demand for new services and integration of legacy systems with the new digital face of the business.

In today’s IT environment, performance has been redefined to mean delivering services faster, with higher quality and with superb economics. The emerging measures of IT performance are around infrastructure efficiency, information availability and security of data. IT is measured on providing an infrastructure that can handle rapid growth and manage business risk while meeting higher required service levels. And of course it is expected that new services will be delivered with tighter budget constraints – with IT expected to do more with less. Designed for virtualised consolidation of business critical workloads, the IBM® Power 780 delivers on performance, availability, efficiency and virtualisation in a way that is exceptional in the industry. PowerVM virtualisation enables continuous, dynamic resource adjustments across all partitions and operating environments, independent of physical placement, to optimise performance while minimising energy usage. Supported environments include AIX, IBM i, Linux® for Power applications, all on the same system.

Feature Benefits
Impressive POWER7+ performance
  • Better customer satisfaction due to improved response time to your customers
  • Infrastructure cost savings from a reduction in the number of servers and software costs
  • Improved efficiency in operations from consolidating multiple workloads on fewer systems
Exceptional PowerVM virtualisation capability
  • Improves system efficiency, which lowers operational expense
  • Provides flexibility in responding to changing business requirements
  • Enables energy savings and maintains application availability
  • Provides ability to handle unexpected workload peaks by sharing resources
  • Enables consolidation of multiple AIX, IBM i and Linux workloads
Mainframe-inspired availability features
  • Better customer satisfaction due to improved application availability
  • Get more work done with less disruption to your business
  • Faster repair when required due to sophisticated system diagnostics
  • Participation in a Power System Pool to reduce planned downtime
Non-disruptive growth options
  • Enables your system to change with your business without forcing everything to stop
  • Aligns expense with usage without sacrificing performance or future growth options
Frugal EnergyScale technology
  • Helps lower energy costs without sacrificing performance or business flexibility
  • Allows business to continue operations when energy is limited
Innovative AME
  • Enables more work to be performed with existing resources
  • Partition level control enables flexibility and optimisation for workload
Broad business application support
  • Allows clients the flexibility to select the right application to meet their needs
  • Helps keep you in the mainstream and off the bleeding edge
Configuration Options Per building block System maximum
Processors 32 x 3.72 GHz POWER7+ processor cores or
16 x 4.42 GHz POWER7+ processor cores		 128 x 3.72 GHz POWER7+ processor cores or
64 x 4.42 GHz POWER7+ processor cores
Sockets Four 16
Level 2 (L2) cache 256 kilobytes (KB) L2 cache per core 256 KB L2 cache per core
L3 cache 10 megabytes (MB) L3 cache per core (eDRAM) 10 MB L3 cache per core (eDRAM)
Enterprise Memory Up to 1 terabyte (TB) of 1066 MHz double data rate-3 (DDR-3)
AME		 Up to 4 TB of 1066 MHz DDR3
AME
Integrated serial attached SCSI (SAS) bays for
  • Solid State Drives (SSD) or
  • Hard Disk Drives (HDD)
 Up to six small form factor (SFF) SAS drive bays Up to 24 SFF SAS drive bays
Disk drives Up to six SFF SAS drives Up to 24 SFF SAS drives
Integrated media bays One slimline for serial advanced technology attachment (SATA) digital versatile disc-random access memory (DVD-RAM) Four slimline for SATA DVD-RAMs
Integrated peripheral component interconnect (PCI) adapter slots Six PCI Express (PCIe) Gen2 slots 24 PCIe Gen2 slots
Integrated multifunction card One per enclosure:
  • Dual 10 gigabit (Gb) + Dual 1 Gb
 Up to four per system:
  • Dual 10 Gb + Dual 1 Gb
Integrated SAS controllers Two SAS direct access storage device (DASD)/SSD controllers
One SATA media controller		 Eight SAS DASD/SSD controllers
Four SATA media controllers
Other integrated ports Three universal serial bus (USB); two HMC; two system power control network (SPCN) Nine USB; four HMC; four SPCN
GX slots (12X) Two Eight
Expansion features (optional – OS dependencies)
Input/output (I/O) expansion Up to four PCIe 12X I/O drawers
Up to eight PCI Extended (PCI-X) DDR 12X I/O drawers		 Up to 16 PCIe 12X I/O drawers
Up to 32 PCI-X DDR 12X I/O drawers
High-bandwidth PCI adapters Six Gb SAS
Other PCI adapters supported SAS, FC, Ethernet, small computer system interface (SCSI), wide area network (WAN)/Async, USB, Crypto, internet SCSI (iSCSI)
PowerVM virtualisation technologies
POWER Hypervisor LPAR, Dynamic LPAR (DLPAR); Virtual local area network (vLAN) (Memory to memory inter-partition communication)
PowerVM Standard Edition (optional) Micro-Partitioning with up to 20 micro-partitions per processor; Multiple Shared Processor Pools; VIOS; Shared Dedicated Capacity
PowerVM Enterprise Edition (optional) PowerVM Standard Edition plus LPM1 and AMS2
RAS features Processor Instruction Retry
Alternate Processor Recovery
Selective dynamic firmware updates
Chipkill memory
Memory DRAM sparing
Error correcting code (ECC) L2 cache, L3 cache
Redundant service processors with automatic failover3
Redundant system clocks with dynamic failover3
Hot-swappable disk bays
Hot-plug/blind-swap PCI slots
Hot-add I/O drawers
Hot-plug power supplies and cooling fans
Dynamic Processor Deallocation
Dynamic deallocation of LPARs and PCI bus slots
Extended error handling on PCI slots
Redundant power supplies and cooling fans
Active Memory Mirroring
Power System Pool
CoD features (optional) Processor and/or Memory CUoD
Elastic Processor and/or Memory CoD
Trial Processor and/or Memory CoD
Utility CoD
OS AIX, IBM i and Linux for Power4
High availability (HA) IBM PowerHA family
Power requirements Operating voltage: 200 V ac to 240 V ac
Power consumption: 1,600 watts maximum per enclosure
System dimensions Power 780 rack drawer building block:
6.9 in. H (4U) × 19.0 in. W × 34.0 in. D (174 mm × 483 mm × 863 mm)
weight 155 lb. (70.3 kg)5
Warranty (limited) Around-the-clock, same day response for one year; on-site (varies by country).
Warranty service upgrades and maintenance are available

1 LPM not supported on IBM i.

2 AMS requires AIX 5.3-12 SP5, IBM i 6.1 or later, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 10 SP4 for Power or later or Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6.1 or later.

3 Requires two or more enclosures (nodes).

4 See Facts and Features for specific supported OS levels.

5 Weight will vary when disks, adapters and peripherals are installed.

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Advantages

Companies embracing Smarter Computing are implementing IT infrastructure based on the IBM Power Systems platform that is designed for data, tuned to the task and managed with cloud technologies. With Power Systems, businesses can outpace their competitors by delivering services faster, differentiate their offerings by delivering higher quality services, and turn operational cost into investment opportunity by delivering services with superior economics.

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Hardware

Power Systems hardware provides the foundation for designing workload optimised systems in conjunction with software and expert domain knowledge. Power servers and blades are modular and scalable and designed from the chip through the software stack to help deliver new levels of business performance.

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Operating systems

Power servers deliver flexibility and choice of operating systems to enable your business to select the best applications for your business needs. Whether running 1, 2, or all 3 - coupled with PowerVM, they maximise the benefit of Power Systems in your business.

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System software

IBM's integrated approach to developing Systems and Systems Software stacks together delivers maximum utilisation, availability, and flexibility helping you deliver new advantages in your business.

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Solutions

IBM and IBM Business Partner solutions exploit key benefits in Power Systems that help you deliver new capabilities and new competitive advantages to your business.

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Migrate to Power

Over the last five years thousands of Oracle and HP UNIX clients have migrated to POWER. Learn how Power Systems has helped them improve their business performance, reduce risk, and establish a more secure future.