IBM Powers Up For Server War

Andy Greenberg, 02.08.10, 12:00 AM EST

As the Oracle-Sun combo heats up hardware competition, IBM's Power7 servers aim to dominate.

Oracle and IBM's knife-fight over high-end enterprise hardware is about to begin--and IBM intends to bring a cannon.

IBM ( IBM - news - people ) plans to announce Monday its first Power7 servers, a long-awaited line of Unix machines that will integrate new chips and software. Big Blue is initially only releasing its mid-range Power7 servers, with both higher- and lower-performance machines to follow later in the year. But IBM says that even the mid-range Power7, the result of three years and $3.2 billion of research and development investment, will squeeze 64 processing cores into each server. It will also double the speed of each of those cores while quadrupling their power efficiency.

IBM's Ross Mauri, manager of the company's Power group, says the servers will be aimed at its "smart infrastructure" customers--those doing real-time analysis of vast amounts of data to optimize complex systems like traffic or water and electricity distribution.

"We're making hardware that was designed to meet the massive scale of these 'smarter planet' projects," says Mauri. One test customer over the last year has been San Mateo, Calif.-based eMeter, which will resell Power servers to manage the data flowing from its Internet-enabled electricity meters in consumers' homes.

But as Oracle ( ORCL - news - people ) completes its integration of Sun Microsystems ( JAVA - news - people ) and aims Sun's high-end servers at IBM customers, Forrester Research analyst Brad Day says a more important factor may be Power7's ability to compete with a wide range of other servers, both low-end x86 machines and high-end Unix hardware.

Unlike Power6 servers, Power7 machines can do the sort of fast-paced transaction processing needed by financial firms, complex analytics from simultaneous data sources or perform high "throughput" computing, including crunching the data-intensive models used in simulations like genomics or weather prediction. "This is the first time they've designed a system that's equally competitive in all these different workloads," says Day. "I'd say they're 18 to 24 months ahead of their competition."

IBM's Mauri pits those versatile machines head-to-head against Sun's offerings: "Sun has their Niagara line, which is throughput computing with lots of cores. But if you want to run transactional computing, they'll try to sell you SPARC," he says, referring to another line of Sun servers. "We have one architecture that's heads-and-tails above both those systems."

Big Blue's new systems aren't cheap: The servers IBM is initially releasing start at $30,000 in their simplest configuration and range up to $1 million.

But those machines likely will help IBM solidify its hold on the high-end server market. The company holds about 40% of market revenues for Unix servers, compared to less than 30% for its biggest competitors, Sun and Hewlett-Packard ( HPQ - news - people ), according to tech tracker IDC. That's a massive switch since the beginning of the last decade, when IBM had less than 20% share and Sun held close to 36%.

Part of that success has been IBM's willingness to foot the bill for companies to migrate their software from other platforms to its Power systems, and even offer discounts based on the value of their competitors' legacy hardware. "They're essentially putting a bounty on Sun and HP," says Forrester's Day.

Given its success at the high end of the hardware spectrum, IBM's larger threat may be the inevitable improvement of commodity servers built on low-end Intel ( INTC - news - people ) and AMD x86 chips.

But Day says that IBM's virtualization software, what it calls PowerVM, allows customers to consolidate their physical x86 servers into virtual machines that can be packed into one much larger, more efficient machine.

By virtue of that software and Power7 servers' sheer size, the new systems could give IBM a leg up on both its low-end and high-end competition. "Although it competes mainly with HP and Sun's high-end servers, Power7 allows them to fire missiles into the x86 space," says Day. "You can clear out a hundred x86 servers and replace them with three of these."