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October 12, 2008

Ross Mauri, General Manager of IBM's Power Systems product series says that Big Blue is accelerating faster than ever in increasing its global share of the Linux server market.

IBM already has a 35 percent market share, but still isn't happy with that.

IBM already competes against Sun Microsystems and Hewlett-Packard for the Unix server market, and has been for many years.

Late Friday, IBM announced a number of new Linux servers and upgrades to help keep its current lead in revenue. Sun's share of the Linux server market is currently pegged at 29.1 percent, while HP is about 25.9 percent. But analysts also expect HP to increase its market share as well.

IBM's Power Systems product line is the latest generation of business servers that started with the AS/400 in 1988 in Rochester, Minnesota.

In March, IBM consolidated its 'System i' and 'System p' servers (heirs to the AS/400 legacy) into the Power Systems line. Then during the IBM Users Group conference at the Mayo Civic Center last week, Big Blue rolled out the second piece of that program.

It includes upgrades to the Power 570 server, with the addition of a Power 560 model along with many other hardware and software developments. Overall, the Power 560 and 570 are manufactured in Rochester and are largely designed there as well.

Mauri added that "Rochester is the brains of the Power Systems." The new Power 570 was given a boost in CPU speed by the addition of processors that double the number of cores in a specific system. That simply means twice the computing power and twice the energy efficiency with no changes to the casing or the form factor.

And the server can be tailored to a business's specific demands and can be expanded without tweaking the software systems or data on the server.

IBM says it can handle the work of thirteen of Sun's Fire V-490 servers or four of its Sparc Enterprise M-5000 servers. IBM also added the new 560 to the Power line-up. It logically fits into a niche between the 570 and the 550 models.

It boosts 4, 8 and 16-core configurations and is designed to help businesses consolidate multiple workloads in different formats and onto less servers.

Add IBM's Power VM energy management software and a single 560 can use 83 percent less power than those groups of Sun servers, according to IBM. So the race between the three technology giants was very different in 1998, when IBM trailed the other two.

The Power4 processor hit the market four years ago, bringing IBM into the race, but still in third place. In 2005, Power5 rolled out and IBM moved ahead of Sun in the Unix server market and brought it neck and neck with HP.

Power6 came out last year, along with software that reduced the need for IT staff attention and cut electricity use. "We left them in our wake," says Mauri. "They are now about five years behind us," he says.

And yet looking to the future, IBM does not want to rest and let them catch up.

"We are working on Power7 and next week I have a meeting to hear about research on Power8," Mauri said. "We're not slowing down. Not one bit..."

Source: IBM.

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