IBM consolidates hardware

By Candice Jones for IBM

Johannesburg, 16 May 2008

Technology giant IBM is unifying its integrated platform System i, and Unix operating systems platform, System p, under a single brand profile.

According to Nigel Adams, System i product and sales programme manager in the UK, the company's new Power Systems brand aims to consolidate its hardware profile.

"The process will bring together the two systems, but they will still be available individually. It is not a component-sharing exercise."

IBM will still support the three primary operating systems, AIX, IBM i and Linux, that the original systems supported. "This cements the development for the hardware; the server line can be sold with any operating system combination."

The company has also released several new server sets under the Power Systems brand. All the new products are being shipped with the Power 6 processor, previously only in the high-end technology ranges.

New servers

The IBM Power 595 is for large-scale server consolidation, or large-scale transaction processing and database applications. It supports eight to 36 cores. According to Adams, it shows 30% increase in performance, compared to its predecessor.

The company has also re-announced the IBM Power 570, which Adams says reflects the unification of the new branding.

The Power 575 is a cluster node for extreme parallel processing performance. One rack in the 575 supports 448 processors.

"The system is water-cooled and will have better power consumption than the older version," says Adams.

Alongside the high-end computing, the entry-level Power 550 and 520 are also being released.

Riding on the wave of virtualisation interest, IBM is now marketing its virtualisation option, PowerVM, more aggressively. "We want to capitalise on these technologies more than we have done in the past."

The new SME targeted blade servers will have an express version of PowerVM included. "The hardware and software initiatives will go hand in glove. It underpins what we are doing in terms of brand consolidation," concludes Adams.