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.

Despite the apparent cost benefits of DB2 over Oracle (especially with Oracle's price rises last year) a  quick straw poll  asked;  What are the inhibitors to migrating from Oracle to DB2? The answers were pretty consistent.

1. Cost and time of application migration and