Datatrend Newsletter: 3Q 2007

President's Perspective

Just when you think IBM will rest a bit on its UNIX® marketplace laurels, here comes POWER6™. As IBM gradually releases new server packages across the product line, the POWER6 family continues to dominate, showcasing the price performance leadership of big blue.
[ read more ]

POWER6 Saves Green Being Green

Did you know that: For ever dollar spent on hardware, it costs approximately 50 cents for the energy to run it? Over the next four years, that energy cost is expected to grow to 71 cents for every dollar spent on hardware?
[ read more ]

POWER6 Live Partitioning Mobility: Now You Don't Have to Put Up with a Shut Down

There is a "necessary evil" IT people have come to expect when companies perform hardware upgrades and maintenance.
[ read more ]

Record-breaking, super fast POWER6™

It's being hailed as the World's Fastest Chip. So fast, in fact, that at 4.7 gigahertz it cycles at a speed 25 million times as fast as the flap of hummingbird wings.
[ read more ]

System p and POWER6 team up for Benchmark Bonanza

If computing benchmarks are like world records, then IBM System p™ servers will need one very large trophy case.
[ read more ]

TechTip: IBM Announces POWER6...What is It?

After looking into the significant benefits and benchmarks of the POWER6 platform, here is a comprehensive breakdown of the features and configurations of the 2007 POWER6 and AIX 6.1 releases.
[ read more ]

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President's Perspective


IBM Extends UNIX® Dominance with POWER6™


Mark Waldrep, President of Datatrend Technologies Just when you think IBM® will rest a bit on its UNIX marketplace laurels, here comes POWER6. As IBM gradually releases new server packages across the product line, the POWER6 family continues to dominate, showcasing the price performance leadership of big blue.

How and when will Sun™ and HP catch up?

The answer to this question remains an industry mystery for some. Others, including myself, see only one possible answer: Not in the foreseeable future.

To further emphasize the POWER6 launch, IBM has renamed the upcoming AIX® version update from AIX 5.4 to AIX 6.1...POWER6 and AIX 6.

Application owners and ISVs now have the task of test validating to both "sixes." There are numerous programs available to aid organizations with AIX and POWER test validation activities. IBM and Datatrend offer a series of evaluations, trials, and "try and buy" offerings. The price performance advantages that POWER6 and AIX 6 bring to the table are significant. Meanwhile, the Linux® case on POWER continues to intrigue and offers "Intel® like" price points at the entry level of the product line.

This issue of TrendSetter dives into a variety of POWER6 features and attributes. With a new series of world record-breaking performance levels, taking a look at POWER6 sooner rather than later will help us realize the dramatically-improved price performance advantages inherent in the upgrades.


POWER6 Saves Green Being Green


Green Server Did you know that:
  • For ever dollar spent on hardware, it costs approximately 50 cents for the energy to run it?

  • Over the next four years, that energy cost is expected to grow to 71 cents for every dollar spent on hardware?
As energy requirements grow each year for power-hungry IT data centers, the impact is felt not only at an individual company's bottom line, but also in the environment.

Faster processing speeds with lower energy requirements


That's why the IBM POWER6 processor is big news today. In that tiny, one-ounce chip there's the promise of helping customers create an energy efficient infrastructure that delivers faster processing speeds and lower energy requirements, which is gentler on the planet.

In other words, you can save green by being green.

The POWER6 chip, which operates at 4.7 gigahertz, allows you to consolidate servers and handle substantially larger workloads, doubling the frequency and bandwidth of the POWER5 chip while using the same amount of electricity as its predecessor, for running and cooling.

With the POWER6 processor, users have the option of increasing their performance by 100% or cutting their power consumption in half.

The EnergyScale™ technology, under the IBM Director™ console, gives you control over how much power the server consumes by allowing you to set a wattage threshold policy for a system, and then analyze the data showing how much power your servers are using.

This processor also has a tool for changing the voltage and frequency of the chip and has a "nap" mode that can lower power consumption by up to 50 percent, with little performance impact.

When used in conjunction with a new feature, "Live Partition Mobility," customers can reduce their energy usage even more by switching over mission-critical processes to a centralized server, enabling them to completely shut down those servers not in use. When you want to get back up to full processing power, all it requires is a power-up then run the "Live Partition Mobility" process again to switch it back. This feature is perfect for those customers who have predictable time frames of slower-than-normal business.

Significant savings for your energy bills and the planet


According to analyst firm IDC, an estimated 50 cents is spent on energy for every dollar of computer hardware. This is expected to rise by 54 percent to 71 cents over the next four years. By using their current green strategies and solutions, the energy savings using POWER6 technology can be substantial: for an average 25,000 square foot data center, companies should be able to achieve 42 percent energy savings.

The annual savings at 12 cents per kilowatt hour are estimated $735,000. At 18 cents per kilowatt hour, annual energy savings are projected at $1.1 million. The energy conservation in this example is the equivalent of having 850 cars off the road!

"Getting Green" efforts on the part of big technology companies and major corporations have become commonplace over the past year because of staggering fuel costs and the impact of IT data centers--which have the reputations of being major energy consumers--on the environment. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, a leader in science and engineering research, estimates that data centers can be over 40 times as energy intensive as conventional office buildings.

It is estimated that the cost of energy it takes to power data centers will increase by 50 percent every two to three years. That is a huge cost to companies, and also a huge cost to the environment. The creation of the POWER6 chip is an important step in the move toward energy efficient, and cost-effective IT departments everywhere.


POWER6 Live Partition Mobility:

Now You Don't Have to Put Up with a Shut Down


Datacenter There is a "necessary evil" IT people have come to expect when companies perform hardware upgrades and maintenance.

It is the system downtime and interrupted applications that happen every time you perform hardware maintenance or physically relocate servers. Whether it takes the server and applications minutes or several hours to reboot, you can almost feel productivity and revenue come to a screeching halt.

All of that changes with the introduction of the IBM POWER6 processor, which has been dubbed the "world's fastest computer chip."

For the first time ever, administrators can transfer the workload on-the-fly from one POWER6 server to another, without application downtime. Now, there's no need or technical reason to interrupt productivity and revenue.

It's called Live Partition Mobility (LPM), and it will change the way administrators look at performing necessary maintenance and planned downtime on their UNIX® and Linux™ servers. It's just one piece of the virtualization pie that POWER6 offers.

Why Virtualization Is Hot


Virtualization is a technique for taking multiple applications and consolidating them onto a fewer number of physical servers. This strategy has proven to yield tremendous savings on a scale of 10:1, 15:1 and even 20:1. What that means is, at a 10:1 ratio, you could take the applications running on 800 servers and consolidate them over 80 physical servers. With savings lower in hardware, space, and maintenance costs, the ROI on a virtualization project can be relatively quick, on a scale of less than three to six months in many cases.

With these types of paybacks, it's easy to see why virtualization is hot. Virtualization is also getting attention at the executive level because of its centralized nature, and what that means for enhancing business continuity, server consolidation and security. If mission-critical information is kept in a centralized location, greater control can be had over the time, type and level of access to those applications, thus preserving the integrity of corporate data.

How to Save 50 Percent of the Cost for Unplanned Downtime


LPM allows users to optimize their IT infrastructure by balancing workloads across multiple servers as their system needs change...and get this...without shutting anything down!

All the while, network connections are preserved and transactions that were in-process during the migration continue, and the whole event appears seamless to the user.

This not only improves power efficiency through consolidation, but also saves money in energy consumption and system downtime. Workloads can easily be redistributed when computing needs increase. More importantly for the IT and finance departments: you can save as much as 50 percent of the cost of unplanned downtime over a five-year period with Live Partition Mobility.

Another important piece of the POWER6 Virtualization pie is the expanded scalability. POWER6 is considered the world's "most powerful consolidation machine" because it can create up to 160 virtual servers (up to 10 virtual machines on each of the sixteen core processors) in a single box. This capability is called "Micro-Partitioning™ and it works in conjunction with LPM to allow the user ever greater control over resource allocation. You can run various workloads - from large scale database transactions to web servers - all on the same server, while still meeting user demands for spikes and drops in workloads on individual virtual machines. Customers can optimize their environment for scalability when workloads change.

Live Partition Mobility and Micro-Partitioning are supported on IBM System p POWER6 servers with plans to introduce the POWER6 chip throughout its BladeCenter®, System p, System i and storage line.


Record-breaking, super fast POWER6™


Data Tunnel It's being hailed as the World's Fastest Chip. So fast, in fact, that at 4.7 gigahertz it cycles at a speed 25 million times as fast as the flap of hummingbird wings.

At a time when the competition has shifted its focus away from increasing processing speed because of the inherent challenges of overheating, POWER6 represents a giant leap forward in clock speed.

POWER6 is twice as fast as the previous generation POWER5™, and running on the new IBM System p570, this is the first time a server has ever held all four major benchmark speed records for business and technical performance. Equally remarkable is the fact that IBM figured out how to combine blistering processor speed and energy conservation. The POWER6 uses approximately the same amount of electricity to run and cool it.

Those benchmarks for speed are:
  • Integer calculating speed common in business applications
  • Floating point-calculating speed, which provides a huge advantage to enterprises running complex ERP and financial applications
  • Java™ performance in business operations per second
  • Transaction processing capability
Overall, this jaw-dropping speed allows organizations to consolidate servers and accommodate significantly larger workloads.

POWER6's processor bandwidth, at 300 gigabytes per second, is also astonishing customers and industry analysts alike. In just about 60 seconds, it could download the entire iTunes® catalog.

Customers with less efficient HP, Sun and Dell™ servers are starting to take notice of POWER6's performance advancements not only in speed, but also in the areas of live partition mobility, scalability, flexibility, dynamic reallocation of resources and power and cooling benefits.


System p and POWER6 team up for Benchmark Bonanza


If computing benchmarks are like world records, then IBM System p™ servers will need one very large trophy case.

Running on POWER6™ processors, System p servers have lapped the competition and taken the lead in over 70 key computing performance benchmarks.

More than bragging rights, these benchmarks translate into real, tangible benefits for customers. Here's a snapshot of the major benchmarks and what they mean to companies that are turning to System p POWER6 to create their own competitive advantages:

Online Transaction Processing (TPC-C): According to the Transaction Processing Performance Council, performance is measured in new-order transactions per minute and the cost per transaction.

Business Intelligence: This benchmark measures the ability of systems to examine large volumes of data, execute queries with a high level of complexity, and provide answers to critical business questions.

Solutions: In this category, the benchmark is provided by SAP® AG, measuring the performance of multiple application servers and a database in a sales and distribution environment. There is also an Oracle® applications benchmark that measures performance running an ERP application in a mixed workload of financials, accounts payable, general ledger, supply chain management and other application modules.

 Power6 Servers
Java™ Business Applications: Server performance is measured specifically against wholesale order processing running typical Java business applications.

Collaboration: System p with POWER6 is ranked #1 in Domino server performance.

High Performance Computing: This category is comprised of multiple benchmarks, each focusing on the speed with which extremely complex equations can be solved.

File Server: This evaluates the throughput and response time of a network file server using the NFS protocol.

Web Serving: This benchmark measures the maximum number of simultaneous connections that a Web server is able to support.



Tech Tip: IBM Announces POWER6...What is It?

Power6 ChipBy Debi Riedel, Lead Architect, Datatrend Technologies

After looking into the significant benefits and benchmarks of the POWER6 platform, here is a comprehensive breakdown of the features and configurations of the 2007 POWER6 and AIX 6.1 releases.

POWER6 570 Server - GA June 2007
  • Conceptually similar to POWER5 570 (CEC drawer architecture)
  • Max 16 POWER6 cores
  • Choice of 3.5, 4.2, 4.7 GHz (dual core chips)
  • Increased memory 756 GB (48GB/core)
  • 40-60% higher performance
  • ~50% lower rPerf/watt
  • PCI-e Adapters
  • 4 PCI-e slots per CEC
  • 2 PCI-x slots per CEC (for backward compatibility)
  • SAS replaces SCSI internal disk
  • 6 SAS disks per CEC
  • 1 disk boot bay per CEC ( vs POWER5 with 2 boot bays per CEC)
  • Integrated Virtual Ethernet option (shared ethernet adapter without VIO server)
  • Live partition mobility (move an entire running partition to a different physical server, GA November)
  • Partition hibernation for reducing power consumption
  • AIX 5.2 TL10, AIX 5.3 TL6, SUSE 10, RedHat 4.5
  • AIX 6.1 (GA November)
AIX 6 (Beta July, GA November 2007)
  • Previously known as "AIX 5.4". Name changed just prior to announcement of POWER6.
  • Binary compatible
  • 64 Bit kernel (32 bit kernel extensions and device drivers not supported)
  • Runs on POWER4 or later servers
  • Decimal Floating Point Accelerators
  • Workload Partitions (extension of Work Load Manager-- similar in function to Sun containers)
  • Workload Partition Manager
  • Optional AIX6 LPP
  • Provides "Application Mobility". Moves running "workload partitions" between AIX6 OS instances.
  • Requires AIX6 + WPM LPP software, and POWER4, 5 or 6 hardware
  • Manual or automatic (policy based) relocation
  • Not a substitute for High Availability
  • Security
  • Role based administration
  • Secure by default (installation option for secure systems)
  • Encrypted filesystems
  • Storage Keys - mainframe like protection of kernel memory for higher availability
  • Dynamic tracing ( probevue )
  • New maintenance strategy
  • 24 month support for each Technology Level
  • No concluding service packs
  • New hardware in same family will be supported on previous TL's for migration simplification
Power6 Advanced Power Virtualization (GA November 2007)
  • Partition mobility - move a running partition to a different server (requires POWER6 hardware, AIX 5.3, AIX 6, Linux)
  • Not a substitute for High Availability
  • Multiple shared CPU pools for grouping micropartitions
  • Ability for a dedicated LPAR to donated unused cycles to micropartitions
  • Virtual partition memory (planned)
  • Share memory pages between partitions
  • Overcommit partition memory
  • Borrow memory from another partition
On The Lighter Side: POWER6 FUN FACTS

The frequency of the POWER6 chip is 25 million times as fast as hummingbird wings.

The frequency of the POWER6 chip is equal to heart beats per second of two-thirds of the human population of the planet (or 69x the population of the UK).

The POWER6 processor has firehose-like bandwidth - enough to download the entire iTunes music catalog in 60 seconds.

The POWER6 chip weighs less than an ounce, but is twice as powerful as the 1.4 Deep Blue super computer that defeated Garry Kasparov 10 years ago this month.

The POWER6 chip can reduce its electricity consumption by 50 percent with negligible performance impact.

(thanks to IBM Development Team for the Fun Facts contribution)

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