IBM announced two high-end Power Systems models -- the UNIX server  and a water-cooled supercomputer. The new systems offer sophisticated IBM virtualization technology and energy-saving capabilities to help dramatically reduce bottom-line operating costs, such as those for energy, floor space and systems management, while improving system performance, helping customers transition to a new enterprise data center.

The UNIX enterprise server, the Power 595, designed to extend IBM's standing in the UNIX market, will be attractive to existing IBM clients as well as Sun Solaris and HP UNIX users. For example, IBM's Power enterprise 64-core server delivers twice the performance at a comparable price as a similarly configured HP Superdome Itanium system.

IBM's new POWER6 "Hydro-Cluster" supercomputer, the Power 575, is built to help users tackle some challenging problems in fields such as energy, aerospace and weather modeling. The new super-dense system, representing a breakthrough in green IT, uses a water-cooling system and with 448 processor cores per rack offers users nearly five times the performance and more than three times the energy efficiency of its predecessor, IBM's POWER5+ processor-based p575 supercomputer.

Customers will be able to leverage POWER6 in these new systems, leading to performance improvements across an array of applications. These advanced processors deliver two-to-three times the performance per core of comparable HP or Sun processors.  And significant energy conservation design improvements enable POWER6 to deliver twice the performance requiring nearly the same amount of electricity to run and cool it as its POWER5 predecessor.

These offerings are an important element in helping clients develop a new enterprise data center, which offers improvements in IT efficiency and provides for deployment of new IT services to support future business growth. IBM is helping clients move to new enterprise data centers by focusing on best practices around virtualization, green IT, service management and cloud computing.

New Generation of Power Systems
The two new computers are part of a comprehensive launch of a new generation of IBM Power Systems that began last week. The launch also includes new milestones, an update to an aggressive UNIX migration program, a Power 570 refresh and Power Systems software updates including:

• A milestone of successfully migrating more than 1,000 clients from competitive platforms to IBM Power Systems -- resulting in nearly $1 billion in revenues.
• A new aggressive IBM Power Rewards migration program allowing customers to earn rewards points by trading in selected HP or Sun UNIX systems. Customers trading in a PA-RISC based HP Superdome system, for example, can earn as much as $512,000 in migration services at no additional charge.
• PowerCare
• A new IBM Power 570
• More Power Systems Software alignment across UNIX, IBM i, and Linux operating environments, including the new PowerHA family for high availability products.