IBM Guarantees Power Server Utilization Rates

At the IBM Edge 2015 conference today IBM unveiled a raft of POWER8 offerings, including a server on which it guarantees utilization rates of up to 70 percent without any compromise to application performance.

The IBM Power System E850 is a four-socket system that comes configured with 4TB of memory. Within the confined of terms and conditions set forth in the IBM Performance Guarantee Program, Don Boulia, vice president of cloud services for IBM Systems, says IBM is not only guaranteeing application performance, but is also only charging customers based on the actual number of cores they use inside any given POWER8 system.

Rather than requiring IT organizations to pay to over provision IT infrastructure, the IBM Power Series gives IT organizations the ability to dynamically scale up and down their IT costs as the nature of application workloads change. In addition, Boulia notes that IBM gives customers the flexibility to move licenses for IBM software between systems regardless of whether they are running on premise or in the cloud.

In addition to the IBM Power System E850, IBM today also unveiled an enhanced IBM Power System E880 that can scale to 192 cores and an implementation of a converged IBM PurePower System that comes bundled with a distribution of OpenStack from IBM.

Also unveiled at the conference is an updated IBM XIV Gen3 system that can store 50 to 80 percent more compressed data and IBM Spectrum Control Storage Insights, a storage management console accessed via the cloud that can be used to manage storage systems running in the cloud and on premise. IBM is also showing a technology preview of a cloud archive service from Iron Mountain through which IT organizations can access live data stored remotely in Iron Mountain data centers.

Finally, IBM also announced a no charge trial of a Mainframe Data Access Service on Bluemix from Rocket through which mainframe applications can access data via the IBM Bluemix cloud integration platform starting next month.

While Boulia says IBM will put Power Series servers up against Intel x86 servers running any application workloads, the Power Series systems are especially tuned for Big Data and cloud applications that typically require higher levels of data throughput.

“For some workloads it comes down to bandwidth and bus size,” Boulia. “It’s about how much data can actually be moved through the whole system.”

At present, Intel clearly dominates both categories in terms of overall adoption. But IBM contends that thanks to the POWER8 alliance both IBM and its infrastructure partners will be able to compete with Intel-based systems on all fronts for years to come.