IBM Upgrades Unix Servers, Power Chip Architecture

Computerworld - IBM last week unveiled upgrades to the high end of its System p5 Unix server line that add dual-core Power5+ processors. The new chips help boost system performance by 25%, the company said.

The performance boost attracted the interest of Bill Powell, manager of systems engineering at Le Mars, Iowa-based Wells Dairy Inc., though he's not currently in the market for new servers. "Anything they do to increase the power and enhance the performance of their products, we're going to look at," Powell said.

Wells Dairy in March installed several new IBM p570 servers with standard Power5 CPUs in a cluster to run Oracle databases containing customer contacts and other information.

Consolidation a Plus

IBM's two new models are the p5-595, which can scale up to 32 processors with 64 cores, and the p5-590, which has 32 cores. A fully configured high-end system can support up to 254 virtual servers per physical server.

Each processor core can support up to 10 virtual servers, according to IBM.

The new IBM servers will be shipped with the company's new Tivoli Usage and Accounting Manager metering tool, IBM said. The tool can track usage by business unit, helping companies better allocate costs, said Jeff Howard, director of System P marketing at IBM.

The servers will be available Aug. 11. Pricing was not immediately disclosed by IBM.

Separately, the Power.org group, founded by IBM and 11 other firms in 2004 to develop and promote the Power technology, last week disclosed that it has developed a unified Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) for the Power processor.

The ISA details how a chip communicates with the operating system.

Previously, the Power ISA was slightly modified for different uses, such as for desktops, embedded systems and servers.

The shared ISA would allow a tool vendor, for instance, to build only one set of tools for the Power processor architecture, said Bill Dykas, manager of Power ecosystem development at IBM and head of operations at Power.org.

According to Charles King, an analyst at Pund-IT Inc. in Hayward, Calif., the new ISA can make it easier for developers to build software for both systems incorporating embedded Power chips and those running high-end processors.

Todd R. Weiss contributed to this story.

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