IBM Adds Faster Midrange Power5+ Server for Linux, AIX

Published: February 14, 2007

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

The LinuxWorld Open Solutions show went on despite the sleet and the snow in New York City today, and IBM made the trek down to the Big City from its Westchester County headquarters to launch a new Power5+ server with lots of cores and aimed specifically at supporting Linux and related middleware and databases popular in the data centers of the world. The server, the p5 560Q, is also able to support AIX workloads, too, so don't think that it is just a Linux box.

The p5 560Q that IBM announced today employs what the company calls a quad core module, or QCM. Rather than create a true quad core chip with the Power5+ generation, IBM put two Power5+ processors in a single package and they share a single CPU socket--what is often called a quasi quad core. The Power5+ chips are dual-core processors, so this means a single two-socket motherboard can have eight cores. The p5 560Q server that IBM announced almost exactly a year ago used geared down 1.5 GHz Power5+ chips and had two motherboards in a single system image (but housed in two separate 4U chasses), yielding a total of 16 cores.

Today, at LinuxWorld, IBM announced a kicker to this box that uses 1.8 GHz Power5+ QCMs as well as supporting the slower 1.5 GHz Power5+ QCMs. IBM is also offering the p5 560Q machine in configurations that have only four or eight cores if customers want to start out with a smaller system and grow into the larger 16-core box.

The p5 560Q supports from 2 GB to 32 GB of DDR2 main memory in a four-core machine and from 4 GB to 64 GB of memory. The big 16-core box can hold up to 128 GB of memory. Each system chassis in the p5 560Q has six 3.5-inch SCSI disk slots that can house 73 GB or 146 GB disks. It supports IBM's AIX 5L 5.3 operating system as well as Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 and Red Hat's Enterprise Linux 4. To run in a virtualized environment, customers have to pay extra per core for IBM's Advanced Power Virtualization hypervisor. With that hypervisor, as many as 160 partitions running either Linux or AIX can be supported on the 16-core machine. To push its point, IBM has even put together a benchmark that shows a 16-core box can run four LAMP stacks--short for Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP--and their related applications per core.

A base p5 560Q will cost $43,800, and the machine will be available on February 23.

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