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Power Systems

IBM Adds More Virtualization Capabilities to Power Systems, Eyeing Sun and HP

October 8, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

IBM, which combined its System i and System p server product lines earlier this year, is revamping its Power Systems to offer more systems for enterprise and midmarket customers. The enhancements include additional processors based on the IBM Power Architecture as well as more virtualization capabilities. These IBM Power Systems compete against both Hewlett-Packard and Sun Microsystems in the Unix market.

IBM is looking to widen its offering for the Unix market with new Power Systems that support more processing cores based on IBM’s Power Architecture as well as new management and virtualization features.

IBM Power Systems were introduced in April as a new set of offerings that combined the older IBM Systems i and System p under one product portfolio. The combination of these two systems gave IBM a set of offerings for enterprises and midmarket companies that not only can run AIX—IBM’s version of Unix—but also Linux and the i OS—the renamed version of the i5/OS operating system.

While the overall Unix market pales in comparison to servers based on x86 processors, this market remains important for three major OEMs: IBM, Hewlett-Packard and Sun Microsystems. According to Gartner, while shipments of Unix-based servers fell in the second quarter of 2008, worldwide revenue increased nearly 10 percent year over year to about $4.2 billion for the quarter. Not surprisingly, IBM, which has been pushing its Unix platforms beyond the enterprise into the midmarket and even the small and midsize business, saw its revenue increase 29 percent in the second quarter for a total of $1.5 billion.

By combining the two systems into one product portfolio, IBM is looking to further strengthen its position in the Unix market. It was also a way to absorb some losses for IBM, which had seen its System i revenue slip in 2007, while System p continued to grow.

HP has its Integrity Systems that use Intel’s Itanium processors, while Sun, which has been struggling selling its high-end servers, offers its SPARC-based products and Solaris operating system.

IBM listed the starting price of the Power 560 Express with the AIX operating system at $47,216. There was no pricing information for the updated version of the Power 570.

In addition to the new hardware, IBM also rolled out several management and virtualization features of its Power Systems. These include an update for IBM’s PowerVM—the company’s virtualization software for Power Systems—called Active Memory Sharing. While only in beta now, Active Memory Sharing allows the system to access more memory in virtual environments by pooling compute resources between the partitions.

IBM is also offering a new management console called Systems Directory. This management tool works across all three operating systems—Linux, i, and AIX—and allows IT managers to control and check the resources both in the physical hardware and within virtual environments.

Finally, IBM is rolling out an Enterprise version of the AIX operating system, which includes the OS itself plus Tivoli and PowerVM software.

Filed Under: Featured, News Tagged With: HP, IBM, IBM PowerVM, Power Systems, PowerVM, sun, sun microsystems, System i, System p, Unix, virtualisation, virtualization

Transitive Welcomes IBM Platform Unification

April 15, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Transitive Corporation, a US-based provider of cross-platform virtualization software that enables the execution of applications across diverse computing platforms, today welcomed IBM‘s unification of its former System i and System p enterprise server families into a common Power Systems product line.

Transitive

The company claims this unification represents a significant market expansion for the PowerVM Lx86 solution that was developed for IBM by Transitive. PowerVM Lx86 is available for all of IBM’s new Power Systems models, which offer POWER6 processors, simplified pricing, increased application choice and reduced energy and administration costs.

The IBM platform unification means that customers using previous System i servers can boost performance and energy efficiency by moving their mission-critical workloads to the new systems (including cost-effective blade options) while continuing to use the same applications and operating systems they have depended on for two decades. These customers can also take advantage of IBM’s PowerVM virtualization — which allows them to create up to 80 virtual partitions per server — as well as using the PowerVM Lx86 cross-platform virtualization solution to run thousands of additional mainstream Linux/x86 applications on the very same Power Systems servers.

“IBM continues to work very closely with Transitive to address the needs of customers interested in reducing server sprawl and saving money by consolidating multiple diverse workloads onto Power Systems servers,” said Scott Handy, vice president of marketing and strategy, IBM Power Systems. “By making PowerVM Lx86 available to the unified Power Systems customer base, the universe of applications that can easily be consolidated by these customers increases beyond AIX, i and Linux on Power native applications to include virtually all Linux/x86 applications as well.”

[Source: Marketwire]

Filed Under: News, Partnerships Tagged With: IBM, IBM Power Systems, Power Systems, PowerVM Lx86, Transitive, Transitive Corporation, virtualisation, virtualization

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