The new POWER equation In a set of announcements many see as the most fundamental since the original launch of the AS/400 twenty years ago, IBM have not only released details of POWER6 processor based servers, plus a new low-end Power blade, but have also completely renamed the whole product offering, including the operating system. In addition, they have brought together almost entirely the complete System i and System p product ranges into a single "Power Systems" portfolio.
Summary of announcements: - Merging of System i and System p into one Power Systems range
- Renaming of the operating system from OS/400 and i5/OS to IBM i
- Announcement of POWER6 processor based Power 520 Express, 550 Express, 595 and enhanced 570.
- Release of a new Power Blade and support for a new BladeCenter chassis aimed at the SMB market.
- General Availability
POWER Systems merger For some time IBM has jointly developed hardware for its two midrange product ranges but this announcement goes even further, merging the two products entirely (except for a couple of specialist former system p specific models) into a Power Systems model range. Each product will support three operating systems – i5/OS, AIX and LINUX – on the same hardware. This change also means alignment of many hardware features and, perhaps more importantly, pricing. With the increases in performance, discussed in more detail later, and the price alignment, it is expected the value and price versus performance ratio will further improve.
Name Change With this announcement the platform specific model and operating system naming is dropped. System i and System p become simply Power Systems, the specific models that were called i550 and p550 and so on are now called Power 550 etc. Whilst the AIX operating system name is unchanged, i5/OS (or OS/400) is now simply called 'i'. Or IBM i if you prefer. Furthermore, the well known convention in operating system releases of ‘VRM’ for Version, Release, Modification is also abandoned in favour of a simple number - so i5/OS V5R4 becomes i 5.4 and i5/OS V6R1 becomes i 6.1.
New Power Models IBM have now released POWER6 processor based versions of the complete model range from the Power 520 and Power 550 Express offerings through enhanced Power 570 to new Power 595 models.
In summary, the model range is as follows;
Power 520 Power6 4.2ghz 1-way 4300cpw up to 16gb memory
Power 520 Power6 4.2ghz 1/2-way 4300-8300cpw up to 32gb memory
Power 550 Power6 4.2ghz 1/4-way 4300-18000cpw up to 128gb memory
Power 570 Power6 4.7ghz 1/16-way 5500-76900cpw up to 768gb memory
Power 595 Power6 5.0ghz 8/64-way CPW to be advised up to 4tb memory
At the higher end (550, 570, 595) the new models are direct replacements for their POWER5+ based predecessors, but at the lower end, since both the 1-way and 2-way are both called Power 520 the demarcation is less clear cut. In effect the 1-way Power 520 replaces the i515 and i520 Express models since it has a lower user limit and less expandability of IO towers etc. The 2-way Power 520 is more a replacement for the i525 and i520 Standard and Enterprise editions, where a higher user limit is required and options for functions such as fibre channel, external IO towers are required.
One important point to note is that all the models above support both IBM i5.4 and i6.1 operating systems and are therefore viable options for current POWER5+ based solutions.
BladeCenter and Power Blade options Earlier this year IBM announced the support for IBM i6.1 operating system on the 4-way JS22 Power Blade in the BladeCenter H chassis and have now supplemented this with the JS12 Express 2-way Power Blade and BladeCenter S chassis. This utilises the same POWER6 3.8ghz processor but offers the advantage of 2 internal disks on the blade itself, plus, with the BladeCenter S SMB chassis, the option for additional disk modules in the BladeCenter, which may reduce the complexity of external SAS or Fibre Channel storage.
The JS12 and JS22 Power blades with the BladeCenter H and S chassis represent a strong opportunity for consolidation of multiple workloads, including OS/400 / i5/OS applications, into a rack based and compact infrastructure.
General Availability - Formal announcement date is April 8th
- Power 520 models are Generally Available April 18th (with the exception of a small number of features which are available May 6th)
- Power 550 models GA May 23rd
- Power 570 with POWER6 processor models are already available.
- Power 595 with POWER6 processors running IBM i operating system will be available in 3rd quarter 2008.
- BladeCenter S chassis is Generally Available from April 25th
- Power Blade JS12 is GA on May 30th
