SCIENCE

IBM has announced that the IBM Power 795 achieved the highest result ever published on the two-tier SAP Sales and Distribution (SD) standard application benchmark with a result of 70,032 SAP SD benchmark users.(1) The 128-core Power 795 handled 79 percent more users than a 256-core Sun SPARC Enterprise M9000 (Oracle's largest system)(2), and 75 percent more users than the 128-core Oracle parallel result published in September running four clustered 32-core Sun Fire X4470 servers with Intel's Xeon X7560 chip(3).

"This Power and DB2 benchmark is yet another example of IBM's technology and workload optimization leadership, demonstrating that IBM Power Systems are able to deliver more application performance with a simpler infrastructure," said Jeff Howard, IBM Power Systems. "IBM Power Systems deliver not only the raw application performance our clients require, but also deliver on new measures of performance such as the superior economics and higher qualities of service they need in a rapidly changing IT environment."

The IBM Power 795, which can support up to 256 cores, uses the latest PowerVM virtualization software to allow customers to run over 1,000 virtual servers on a single physical system, enabling a substantial improvement in operating efficiency and levels of server, storage and network virtualization beyond commodity virtualization like VMware.  

Throughout 2010, IBM has filled out its POWER7 lineup of workload optimizing systems, all of which are now available and shipping to customers. These new systems can help customers manage vast amounts of data and gain insight from that data, expand their businesses, and avoid costly downtime. IBM's ongoing investment in research and development and experience through thousands of customer engagements combine to provide superior performing systems at a lower cost.