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Power6 Announcement Summary
Subject: Power6 Announcement Summary
Audience: All
Date: June 16, 2007
Here's a brief summary of the recent IBM Power6 announcements.
What was announced?
- Power6 570 Server
- Advanced Power Virtualization
- AIX 6
- HMC 1.7
- VIO 1.4
Power6 570 Server (GA June 2007)
- Announcement: http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/p/news/features/2007/annc_0522.pdf
- Conceptually similar to Power5 570 (CEC drawer architecture)
- Max 16 Power6 cores
- Choice of 3.5, 4.2, 4.7 GHz (dual core chips)
- Increased memory 756 GB (48GB/core)
- 40-60% higher performance
- ~50% lower rPerf/watt
- PCI-e Adapters
- 4 PCI-e slots per CEC
- 2 PCI-x slots per CEC (for backward compatibility)
- SAS replaces SCSI internal disk
- 6 SAS disks per CEC
- 1 disk boot bay per CEC ( vs Power5 with 2 boot bays per CEC)
- Integraded Virtual Ethernet option (shared ethernet adapter without VIO server)
- Live partition mobility (move an entire running partition to a different physical server, GA November)
- Partition hibernation for reducing power consumption
- OS Support
- AIX 5.2 TL10, AIX 5.3 TL6, SUSE 10, RedHat 4.5
- AIX 6.1 (November GA)
Power6 Advanced Power Virtualization (November 2007)
- Partition mobility - move a running partition to a different server (requires Power6 hardware. AIX 5.3, AIX 6, Linux)
- Not a substitute for High Availability
- Multiple shared CPU pools for grouping micropartitions
- Ability for a dedicated LPAR to donated unused cycles to micropartitions
- Virtual partition memory (planned)
- Share memory pages between partitions
- Overcommit partition memory
- Borrow memory from another partition
AIX 6 (Beta July, GA November 2007)
- Previously known as "AIX 5.4". Name changed just prior to announcement.
- Binary compatible
- 64 Bit kernel (32 bit kernel extensions and device drivers not supported)
- Runs on Power4 or later servers
- Decimal Floating Point Accelerators
- Workload Partitions (extension of Work Load Manager. Similar in function to Sun containers)
- Workload Partition Manager
- Optional AIX6 LPP
- Provides "Application Mobility". Moves running "workload partitions" between AIX6 OS instances.
- Requires AIX6 + WPM LPP software, and Power4, 5 or 6 hardware
- Manual or automatic (policy based) relocation
- Not a substitute for High Availability
- Security
- Role based administration
- Secure by default (installation option for secure systems)
- Encrypted filesystems
- Storage Keys - mainframe like protection of kernel memory for higher availability
- Dynamic tracing ( probevue )
- New maintenance strategy -
- 24 month support for each Technology Level
- No concluding service packs
- New hardware in same family will be supported on previous TL's for migration simplification
HMC 7 (GA June 2007)
VIO 1.4 (GA June 2007)
Bruce Spencer,
baspence@us.ibm.com
June 16, 2007