p5 Servers Look to SMB Space

IBM upgraded its Unix server series with the System p5 560Q 4-core module machine, which the company claims rivals the performance of most 16-way systems on the market.
With the release of the 560Q and some promotional pricing, Big Blue is tapping into the SMB space.

The new machine, now the king of the Q series p5 servers for midrange customers, uses IBM’s latest Power5+ chip with Quad-Core Module (QCM) multithreading technology to provide a performance boost.

IBM said the p5 560Q compares favorably with competing 16-core systems from Sun Microsystems on Java business application performance. The company said the p5 560Q is a sound choice for running database and Web applications.

Announced last fall, the Quad Core Module is essentially two dual-core chips on the same wafer. This form factor, designed to help customers consolidate the workloads of several servers onto one machine, enables enterprises to have four Power5+ 1.5 GHz cores in one socket and run up to twice as many workloads.

The System p5 Express machines are available with a combination of AIX 5L, Unix, Red Hat or Novell SUSE Linux operating systems.

To make its Quad-Core offering more attractive for SMBs, IBM also said it is providing promotional software licensing for the p5 Express family of machines.

Enterprises that purchase IBM middleware, such as WebSphere Application Server and DB2 Enterprise Server Edition, with any System p5 model 510Q, 520Q, 550Q, or 560Q, will recieve a 50 percent promotional software licensing discount.

More details on this promotional offering, including specific terms and conditions and eligible middleware products, will be available within a month.

In other news, IBM said its System p5 570 and p5 575 machines are now running the Power5+ processor at 2.2 gigahertz, a clock speed bump from the previous Power5+ running at 1.9 GHz.

This article was originally published on internetnews.com.