IBM Power Systems Announcements : 12th April 2011

There were a number of announcements made today by Power Systems including new hardware features, a new platform management console, and new PowerVM virtualization capabilities.

Two new Power Systems blade servers were announced, the PS703 and PS704. The PS703 blade supports up to 16 processor cores in a single BladeCenter slot and the PS704 supports up to 32 cores in a double-wide blade.  The PS703 and PS704 also support a new solid state drive option.

The Power 750 Express server has new processor options or 4, 6 or 8 cores per socket and up to 3.7 Ghz clock speed. This allows for more flexibility to configure the 750 in different combinations of processor speed, number of processor cores, memory per core and I/O performance to best meet the need of your particular workload.

The Power 750, Power 730 and Power 740 also now support factory deconfiguration of some of the processor cores. Selecting this feature takes some of the processor cores offline and is intended to help clients manage software costs by reducing the number of cores that need to be licensed. As the client workload increases, the client can enable the offline cores. This is not capacity upgrade on demand because the client pays for all cores at the initial purchase.  This capability has previously been available for the PS7xx blades and Power 710 and Power 730 systems.

The Systems Director Management Console (SDMC) management console is a follow-on to the Hardware Management Console (HMC). The SDMC incorporates the IBM Systems Director software and provides significant new function, particularly for blade servers including support for multiple VIOS partitions on a blade server,, Live Partition Mobility and Active Memory Expansion support. One of the biggest benefits of using the SDMC is consistent management of both Power Systems blades and Power Systems rack and tower servers. The SDMC can manage POWER6 and POWER7 processor based servers and is available as a physical appliance like the HMC and as a virtual appliance image.

PowerVM virtualization was enhanced to support more partitions on some servers: up to 320 partitions on the Power 750, 640 partitions on the Power 770 and Power 780 and up to 1000 partitions on the Power 795. PowerVM also now supports partition suspend and resume for IBM i.

The Power 795 (at the new firmware level) now supports additional availability features including Hot-node Add, Hot-node Upgrade (memory) and Hot-node Repair as well as concurrent GX Adapter Add and Hot GX Adapter Repair and concurrent System Controller repair.
There are a number of other announcements including new l/O, a new mCommerce appliance and a product preview for the Power 775 Supercomputer. All announcement details can be found at www.ibm.com/power