Director of Power Systems
This week IBM announced the newest open source servers that incorporate POWER8 technology.
In a word: AWESOME! These appear to be the most advanced servers in the industry, providing incredible performance at a price point never before seen in Power Systems.
My view is simple: The POWER8 systems can lower your cost of computing. And here’s how:
- Highest performing systems in market:
- Higher performance = less servers
- Less servers = less administration costs
- Leadership virtualization = higher system utilization
- 1/3 to 1/2 reduction in software licenses with POWER8 based systems due to higher core performance:
- Improved core architecture
- Improved cache structure
- Improved threading
- Management and energy cost reduction
- Highest RAS means less down time
What is the technology? Twelve core chips and six core chips in a Dual Chip Module (DCM) provided at an excellent price point. With PCIe-gen 3, I/O bandwidths now go to 230 GB/sec where they used to be 80. Memory bandwidth to 400 GB/sec with DDR4 buffered memory and an integrated L4 cache. The system also has 512 GB of RAM per socket.
These systems are incredible and will shine as business analytic machines where it is all about performance…nothing will touch them! For Java workloads, there are more internal execution units and large memory capabilities to provide the fastest Java execution in the industry. The bandwidth on IO will be incredible for databases and also with integrated SSDs, the internal storage (up to 1 TB) can be supported by Easy-Tier and provide up to 400,000 iops.
With the new price points, IBM has created a better system to address cloud enablement, analytics, mobile computing support, and social applications. And with all these enhancements, do not overlook the traditional Power Systems affinity – DB and transaction serving – it’s still there.
For additional information about the new IBM POWER8 Systems, please contact me or your Mainline account executive.