At LinuxWorld here today, IBM announced that dozens of customers -- including Volkswagen AG and Telefonica Moviles -- have recently selected Linux on POWER for consolidating their UNIX and x86 workloads to IBM's System p servers as they seek to maximize their IT investments and become more energy efficient. When combined with those customers migrating from competitive platforms to IBM's AIX UNIX operating system on System p, the migrations to Linux on POWER are part of a broader overall increase in adoption of System p servers that bring the total migrations to more than 700 since the start of 2006, including over 250 this year alone.
For example, Volkswagen AG, a global automobile manufacturer based in Germany, has consolidated from 76 competitive UNIX servers down to six System p5 570 servers running Linux in order to significantly reduce total cost of ownership while boosting speed to market. Volkswagen's strategy has allowed the company to implement a more manageable and scalable underlying hardware and software solution architecture, enabling the automobile manufacturer to quickly respond to changing market conditions.
"The move to System p has enabled us to be more responsive to customer needs in the fluctuating automobile market," said Wolfgang Petersen, IT Services, Volkswagen AG. "Collaborating with IBM helps us align innovative products and services and get them to market faster to meet customer demand. We've been able to boost our efficiency levels with faster standardized processes and operations."
Another customer, Telefonica Moviles España, the largest mobile operator in Spain, is now implementing a strategy to streamline the IT architecture used for its mobile business. Telefonica Moviles España is working to consolidate value-added services applications on two System p5 595 servers running the Linux operating system.
"We are innovating to define a new reference architecture that allow us to reduce the deploying speed of new services for our customers. IBM System p platform with the virtualization capabilities has become a key piece of our strategy," said, Miguel Angel García Hafner, technology manager for Value Added Services in Telefonica Moviles España. "Consolidating our workloads on Linux on POWER has been an easy process and is helping us to significantly lower operational costs, reducing dramatically the IT complexity ."
Workload consolidations are designed to reduce cost, power and space and simplify management and operations of customer infrastructures.
Moving UNIX and x86 workloads to Linux on POWER
The number of Linux on POWER applications continues to expand -- currently there are nearly 3,000 applications running natively on Linux on POWER-based System p servers. In addition, IBM's System p Application Virtual Environment (System p AVE ) is designed to allow thousands more x86 Linux binaries to run unmodified and without recompilation on System p servers. Supplementing native Linux on POWER applications with the ability to also consolidate Linux x86 application binaries on System p is designed to greatly increase customer options for workload consolidation, simplifying and optimizing their IT environments.
To help accelerate these customer consolidations, since April 23 IBM has been offering a beta version of p AVE, a new translation software technology, through a worldwide Web-based download free of charge to customers, IBM business partners and independent software vendors (ISVs). More than 150 companies representing 30 countries have already downloaded this unique virtualization solution designed to consolidate x86 Linux workloads on System p servers.
Telefonica Moviles España has already tested the p AVE beta and plans to put it into full production. Customers and ISVs can download and test the beta version of p AVE at no charge by going to : http://www-03.ibm.com/.... IBM intends to make this capability generally available in the second half of 2007, according to a statement of direction issued a year ago.1
"IBM is seeing clients go green by consolidating UNIX and x86 workloads on Linux on System p to save money with operational efficiencies and by using less energy, cooling and floor space," said Scott Handy, IBM vice president of worldwide marketing and strategy for IBM Power Systems. "With Solaris, HP/UX and now x86 workloads moving to System p, we are extending our lead in UNIX servers. According to IDC, IBM System p servers have gained more than 12 points of revenue share over the past five years on a rolling four-quarter basis, including five points from HP and three points from Sun, to become the number one UNIX server in terms of customer revenue."
Twelve new Linux leadership benchmarks
IBM has already demonstrated the performance capabilities of the System p 570 through 25 leadership benchmark results running on the AIX operating system.2 Today, IBM is announcing 12 new benchmark results on the System p 570 server running with the Linux operating system. Four of these results have set overall leadership in their class, while the other eight have achieved the distinction of "Best of Linux." 2
Featuring the new POWER6 processor, a 16-core IBM System p 570 running the Linux operating system achieved 2.5 times the performance on the SPECint_rate2006 benchmark, a popular indicator of infrastructure and computational scalability, than a similarly configured HP rx8640 Itanium-2 system also running the Linux OS.3 Supporting three times more memory than the HP system in a maximum configuration, System p 570 provides the capacity to consolidate and manage many more applications, even ones which have high memory and processor requirements.
And, the System p570 is one server that is equipped for consolidation. IBM calculates that 15 HP Integrity rx7640 systems can be consolidated into a single rack of the IBM System p570 running with the Linux operating system, saving more than $25,000 per year on energy costs alone.4
High performance computing solutions
In other news, IBM announced new releases of the General Parallel File System (GFPS) Version 3.2 and the Engineering and Scientific Subroutine Library (ESSL) Version 4.3
The new release of GPFS offers improvements in scalability and performance, installability, manageability, monitoring and availability. GPFS provides fast, reliable, and scalable access to structured and unstructured data. For example GPFS can support access speeds of 130+GB/sec to a single file on a two petabyte file system. It addresses the needs of the most demanding commercial customers by providing storage consolidation, file virtualization and simplified policy-based file management. GPFS also continues to offer leadership5 in high-end technical and high performance computing (HPC) by supporting multi-petabytes of storage and hundreds or thousands of nodes in a single file system. For more information on GPFS, please visit http://www.ibm.com/....
ESSL Version 4.3 provides new run-time libraries. ESSL is a collection of highly optimized state-of-the-art mathematical subroutines specifically tuned to IBM hardware that is designed to provide significant performance improvement to any math-intensive scientific or engineering applications. For more information on ESSL, please visit http://www.ibm.com/....
Both releases include support of the System p 570 server and the RHEL5 and SLES10 Linux operating systems
About IBM System p servers
Renowned for their computing power, IBM System p servers and workstations support user needs across a broad range of applications, including transaction processing, web publishing, data mining, systems management and others. This family of 1-to 64-core IBM Power processor-based systems is designed to provide customers with leadership features for high performance, availability, scalability and dynamic resource allocation. Unique IBM virtualization features allow users to process more information on a single server, creating the potential to save on total cost of system ownership, as well as space and energy costs.
System p products are designed for smaller and mid-sized business and large enterprises that are using UNIX platforms. The servers use AIX, IBM's open UNIX operating system, and also support thousands of Linux-based applications. Migration services enable customers to quickly and easily convert from competing platforms -- such as Sun Microsystems and Hewlett-Packard -- to IBM hardware.
System p servers are powered by IBM's leadership technology, including the POWER6 microprocessor, the world's fastest chip, built using IBM's state-of-the-art 65 nanometer process technology. At 4.7GHz, the dual-core POWER6 processor doubles the speed of the previous generation POWER5 while using nearly the same amount of electricity to run and cool it, meaning customers can use the new processor to either increase their performance by 100 percent or cut their power consumption virtually in half.
For more information on IBM System p servers and offerings, please visit http://www-03.ibm.com/....
1 - Statement of Direction: http://www-03.ibm.com/...
2 - Benchmarks can be found at http://www.ibm.com/....
3 - Source: www.SPEC.org, current as of 07/25/07; IBM SPECint_rate2006 result of 466 on a 16-core (8 processor chips, 32 threads) 4.7 GHz POWER6 IBM System p 570 running SLES 10 SP1vs. HP SPECint_rate2006 result of 177 on a 16-core (8 processor chips, 32 threads) 1.6 GHz/24MB Dual-Core Intel Itanium 2 HP Integrity rx8640 server running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.4
4 -This calculation is based on the trend toward consolidation of existing installed systems. The virtualized system count and energy savings were derived from several factors:
A performance factor of 2.79X was applied to the virtualization scenario based on SPEC® results source: www.spec.org . System p 570 (16-core, 8 chips, 2 chips per core, 4.7 GHz, SLES 10 SP1 Linux OS ): SPECint_rate2006: 466, published on 7/25/2007. HP Integrity rx7640 (16-core, 8 chips, 2 chips per core, 1.6 GHz, Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS release 4.4) SPECint_rate2006: 167 as of 7/25/2007. A virtualization factor of 3X was applied to the virtualization scenario using utilizations derived from studies conducted by Alinean available at: http://www-935.ibm.com/.... A factor of 2X was used to represent the ability to install two 16-core System p 570 systems in a single rack. Power consumption figures of 5600 W for the IBM System p570 and 2030 W for the HP rx7640 were based on the maximum rates published by IBM and HP, respectively: http://h20341.www2.hp.com/..., https://www-01.ibm.com/...
Air conditioning power requirement estimated at 50% of system power requirement. Energy cost of $.0928 per kWh is based on 2007 YTD US Average Retail price to commercial customers per US DOE at http://www.eia.doe.gov/... as of 8/3/2007. The reduction, if any, in floor space, power, cooling and software costs depends on the specific customer, environment, application requirements, and the consolidation potential.
5 - GPFS used in 6 of the top 10 supercomputers on the Top500 list http://top500.org. current as of June 2007.
For example, Volkswagen AG, a global automobile manufacturer based in Germany, has consolidated from 76 competitive UNIX servers down to six System p5 570 servers running Linux in order to significantly reduce total cost of ownership while boosting speed to market. Volkswagen's strategy has allowed the company to implement a more manageable and scalable underlying hardware and software solution architecture, enabling the automobile manufacturer to quickly respond to changing market conditions.
"The move to System p has enabled us to be more responsive to customer needs in the fluctuating automobile market," said Wolfgang Petersen, IT Services, Volkswagen AG. "Collaborating with IBM helps us align innovative products and services and get them to market faster to meet customer demand. We've been able to boost our efficiency levels with faster standardized processes and operations."
Another customer, Telefonica Moviles España, the largest mobile operator in Spain, is now implementing a strategy to streamline the IT architecture used for its mobile business. Telefonica Moviles España is working to consolidate value-added services applications on two System p5 595 servers running the Linux operating system.
"We are innovating to define a new reference architecture that allow us to reduce the deploying speed of new services for our customers. IBM System p platform with the virtualization capabilities has become a key piece of our strategy," said, Miguel Angel García Hafner, technology manager for Value Added Services in Telefonica Moviles España. "Consolidating our workloads on Linux on POWER has been an easy process and is helping us to significantly lower operational costs, reducing dramatically the IT complexity ."
Workload consolidations are designed to reduce cost, power and space and simplify management and operations of customer infrastructures.
Moving UNIX and x86 workloads to Linux on POWER
The number of Linux on POWER applications continues to expand -- currently there are nearly 3,000 applications running natively on Linux on POWER-based System p servers. In addition, IBM's System p Application Virtual Environment (System p AVE ) is designed to allow thousands more x86 Linux binaries to run unmodified and without recompilation on System p servers. Supplementing native Linux on POWER applications with the ability to also consolidate Linux x86 application binaries on System p is designed to greatly increase customer options for workload consolidation, simplifying and optimizing their IT environments.
To help accelerate these customer consolidations, since April 23 IBM has been offering a beta version of p AVE, a new translation software technology, through a worldwide Web-based download free of charge to customers, IBM business partners and independent software vendors (ISVs). More than 150 companies representing 30 countries have already downloaded this unique virtualization solution designed to consolidate x86 Linux workloads on System p servers.
Telefonica Moviles España has already tested the p AVE beta and plans to put it into full production. Customers and ISVs can download and test the beta version of p AVE at no charge by going to : http://www-03.ibm.com/.... IBM intends to make this capability generally available in the second half of 2007, according to a statement of direction issued a year ago.1
"IBM is seeing clients go green by consolidating UNIX and x86 workloads on Linux on System p to save money with operational efficiencies and by using less energy, cooling and floor space," said Scott Handy, IBM vice president of worldwide marketing and strategy for IBM Power Systems. "With Solaris, HP/UX and now x86 workloads moving to System p, we are extending our lead in UNIX servers. According to IDC, IBM System p servers have gained more than 12 points of revenue share over the past five years on a rolling four-quarter basis, including five points from HP and three points from Sun, to become the number one UNIX server in terms of customer revenue."
Twelve new Linux leadership benchmarks
IBM has already demonstrated the performance capabilities of the System p 570 through 25 leadership benchmark results running on the AIX operating system.2 Today, IBM is announcing 12 new benchmark results on the System p 570 server running with the Linux operating system. Four of these results have set overall leadership in their class, while the other eight have achieved the distinction of "Best of Linux." 2
Featuring the new POWER6 processor, a 16-core IBM System p 570 running the Linux operating system achieved 2.5 times the performance on the SPECint_rate2006 benchmark, a popular indicator of infrastructure and computational scalability, than a similarly configured HP rx8640 Itanium-2 system also running the Linux OS.3 Supporting three times more memory than the HP system in a maximum configuration, System p 570 provides the capacity to consolidate and manage many more applications, even ones which have high memory and processor requirements.
And, the System p570 is one server that is equipped for consolidation. IBM calculates that 15 HP Integrity rx7640 systems can be consolidated into a single rack of the IBM System p570 running with the Linux operating system, saving more than $25,000 per year on energy costs alone.4
High performance computing solutions
In other news, IBM announced new releases of the General Parallel File System (GFPS) Version 3.2 and the Engineering and Scientific Subroutine Library (ESSL) Version 4.3
The new release of GPFS offers improvements in scalability and performance, installability, manageability, monitoring and availability. GPFS provides fast, reliable, and scalable access to structured and unstructured data. For example GPFS can support access speeds of 130+GB/sec to a single file on a two petabyte file system. It addresses the needs of the most demanding commercial customers by providing storage consolidation, file virtualization and simplified policy-based file management. GPFS also continues to offer leadership5 in high-end technical and high performance computing (HPC) by supporting multi-petabytes of storage and hundreds or thousands of nodes in a single file system. For more information on GPFS, please visit http://www.ibm.com/....
ESSL Version 4.3 provides new run-time libraries. ESSL is a collection of highly optimized state-of-the-art mathematical subroutines specifically tuned to IBM hardware that is designed to provide significant performance improvement to any math-intensive scientific or engineering applications. For more information on ESSL, please visit http://www.ibm.com/....
Both releases include support of the System p 570 server and the RHEL5 and SLES10 Linux operating systems
About IBM System p servers
Renowned for their computing power, IBM System p servers and workstations support user needs across a broad range of applications, including transaction processing, web publishing, data mining, systems management and others. This family of 1-to 64-core IBM Power processor-based systems is designed to provide customers with leadership features for high performance, availability, scalability and dynamic resource allocation. Unique IBM virtualization features allow users to process more information on a single server, creating the potential to save on total cost of system ownership, as well as space and energy costs.
System p products are designed for smaller and mid-sized business and large enterprises that are using UNIX platforms. The servers use AIX, IBM's open UNIX operating system, and also support thousands of Linux-based applications. Migration services enable customers to quickly and easily convert from competing platforms -- such as Sun Microsystems and Hewlett-Packard -- to IBM hardware.
System p servers are powered by IBM's leadership technology, including the POWER6 microprocessor, the world's fastest chip, built using IBM's state-of-the-art 65 nanometer process technology. At 4.7GHz, the dual-core POWER6 processor doubles the speed of the previous generation POWER5 while using nearly the same amount of electricity to run and cool it, meaning customers can use the new processor to either increase their performance by 100 percent or cut their power consumption virtually in half.
For more information on IBM System p servers and offerings, please visit http://www-03.ibm.com/....
1 - Statement of Direction: http://www-03.ibm.com/...
2 - Benchmarks can be found at http://www.ibm.com/....
3 - Source: www.SPEC.org, current as of 07/25/07; IBM SPECint_rate2006 result of 466 on a 16-core (8 processor chips, 32 threads) 4.7 GHz POWER6 IBM System p 570 running SLES 10 SP1vs. HP SPECint_rate2006 result of 177 on a 16-core (8 processor chips, 32 threads) 1.6 GHz/24MB Dual-Core Intel Itanium 2 HP Integrity rx8640 server running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.4
4 -This calculation is based on the trend toward consolidation of existing installed systems. The virtualized system count and energy savings were derived from several factors:
A performance factor of 2.79X was applied to the virtualization scenario based on SPEC® results source: www.spec.org . System p 570 (16-core, 8 chips, 2 chips per core, 4.7 GHz, SLES 10 SP1 Linux OS ): SPECint_rate2006: 466, published on 7/25/2007. HP Integrity rx7640 (16-core, 8 chips, 2 chips per core, 1.6 GHz, Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS release 4.4) SPECint_rate2006: 167 as of 7/25/2007. A virtualization factor of 3X was applied to the virtualization scenario using utilizations derived from studies conducted by Alinean available at: http://www-935.ibm.com/.... A factor of 2X was used to represent the ability to install two 16-core System p 570 systems in a single rack. Power consumption figures of 5600 W for the IBM System p570 and 2030 W for the HP rx7640 were based on the maximum rates published by IBM and HP, respectively: http://h20341.www2.hp.com/..., https://www-01.ibm.com/...
Air conditioning power requirement estimated at 50% of system power requirement. Energy cost of $.0928 per kWh is based on 2007 YTD US Average Retail price to commercial customers per US DOE at http://www.eia.doe.gov/... as of 8/3/2007. The reduction, if any, in floor space, power, cooling and software costs depends on the specific customer, environment, application requirements, and the consolidation potential.
5 - GPFS used in 6 of the top 10 supercomputers on the Top500 list http://top500.org. current as of June 2007.
