IBM are gradually releasing the features from the next generation of POWER7 VIOS. In short VIO servers will be able to participate in a cluster outside of a single frame (across multiple boxes). This will mean that you can present virtual disks to LPAR's from one VIO server and make them available to another server via another VIO server at the same time without using NPIV. This reduces the dependency on feature rich storage (and cooperative storage teams!) will prove useful for the scale-out clustering technologies and for partition mobility.

They are planning to build in some useful auto-provisioning, Snapshot, cloning and thin provisioning features at the VIO cluster level all controller by director. Making it much more flexible to work in a virtualised environment with multiple systems.

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 IBM Recently anouncing that they are no longer offering their IBM POWER6 product range, I looked at what this meant and possible upgrade options available for upgrades and how best to maximise any machines that still have spare CPU/RAM slots that could be upgraded.
The withdrawal dates for IBM POWER6 after which you can't buy new machines (nor POWER5 to POWER6 upgrades) are as follows:...

The new rPerf document from IBM released on the 17th of Aug contains some big rperf numbers for the IBM System P POWER7 795, and due to the dramatic leap in processor core count (64 on a 595, to 256 on a 795) they have paid some thought to the way they display the rPerf figures.

POWER7 in the smaller cheaper rack mount options have been announced making the new POWER7 chipset available to the SME market as of Sept. I'm looking forward to doing some costing against x86 solutions in this zone, the prices look competitive, especially if you take OS and virtualisation software into account.

http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2010/08/17/ibm_power7_low_high/page2.html 

IBM told the world that the new POWER7 range of servers were going to be fast.  We saw their benchmarks and read their white papers.  But I always reserve judgment until somebody else runs their own benchmark on a new piece of hardware.

"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?

I'm not sure what "Nodal Scope Speculative Coherence Broadcast" means but I understand 4 threads per core, 1000 partitions per system and up to 256-way SMP system. See the below for lots of information on POWER7
http://bit.ly/2le8t1

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According to the below report AIX on POWER is still statistically the best OS for maximum uptime. I think that the comparison of the UNIX based operating systems are fair as these servers are likely to be doing similar jobs. The Windows results however are heavily skewed by the number of security patches that have had to be applied to the frontline servers. Is this a measure of the OS or a reflection on the position of the servers in the application stack/network layer?

http://windowsitpro.com/article/articleid/98475/windows-server-the-new-king-of-downtime.html

I would be really interested in a report that compared similar applications (e.g. ERP or database systems) running on AIX, HP-UX, Solaris and windows. 
Relative performance comparisons and benchmarking different systems is something that can be done in a finite amount of time with a lab full of kit. But uptime comparisons rely on surveys and user reports over an extended period of time, and never seem to be from well grouped application categories. If anyone has seen better stats that make more detailed comparison of OS uptime please let me know.

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IBM have released some notes to help people plan for future releases of POWER chips. It indicates the technologies that will be supported (i.e. I/O cards, drawers disks etc) and those that will be dropped from POWER7 onwards.

http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/power/hardware/sod2.html

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