Whilst the legal battle over Oracle removing development on the Itanium chip rumbles on IBM are increasing market share by offering a number of solutions to those customers who are fed up with either Oracle, HP or both.

Fed up with Oracle? IBM continue to develop and support the DB2 database platform on Itanium

"With POWER7 you get twice the performance, use half the power and four times the virtual capacity for the same price as POWER6". IBM 08 Feb 2010.

Now IBM have officially announced the IBM System P POWER7 range I thought I'd test some of IBM's bold claims for performance vs purchase price, power consumption and space savings for the new POWER7 range by comparing it with the POWER6 range. Have they really changed that much? The move from IBM System P POWER5 to IBM System P POWER6 was a great improvement in performance and brought with it some great new features, but the price was still very high and left open the door to a price contest with x86 alternatives and some challenging total cost of ownership (TCO) comparisons. I thought I'd start by taking a look at the really popular entry point in the POWER range - the 550 (4U rack mount).  First thing to note is that it is now called the 750 (finally the numbers make sense!) So how does it compare on price/performance with the POWER6?