IBM revamps its Power Systems
After combining its System i and System p sever product lines earlier in the year, IBM is to revamp its Power Systems to offer more systems for enterprise and mid-market customers. The enhancements will include additional processors based on the IBM Power Architecture as well as more virtualization capabilities.
IBM is looking to widen its offering to the UNIX market with new Power Systems that support more processing cores based on IBM’s Power Architecture as new management and virtualization features.
IBM power systems were introduced last April as a new set of offerings that combined the older IBM systems i and System p within one product range. These two systems combined gave IBM a set of offerings for enterprises and mid-market companies that not only can run AIX – IBM’s version of UNIX – but also Linux and the i OS – the renamed version of the i5/OS operating system.
By joining the two systems together, IBM has found a way to absorb some losses which saw its System i revenue drop in 2007, while System p continued to flourish.
In addition to the new hardware IBM also brought out several management and virtualization features of its Power Systems. These include and update for IBM’s PowerVM – the company’s virtualization software for Power Systems – called Active Memory Sharing (AMS). Although currently in beta form, AMS allows the system to access more memory in virtual environments by compiling compute resources between the partitions.
IBM is also offering new management console called Systems Directory. This management tool works across all three operating systems – Linux, i and AIX – and allows IT managers to control and check the resources both in the physical hardware and within virtual environments.
Lastly, IBM will roll out an Enterprise version of the AIX OS, which includes the Tivoli and PowerVM software.
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