IBM Unleashes World's Fastest UNIX System; Offers Twice the

IBM Unleashes World's Fastest UNIX System; Offers Twice the Performance of HP Itanium System at Comparable Price

Power Rewards Program

Similar to a frequent flyer incentive, this new program offers reward points to competitively installed customers based on the number of HP or Sun cores retired or traded-in when migrating to IBM Power Systems. Customers can redeem points toward no-charge migration services to move from HP-UX or Sun Solaris to AIX or Linux operating environments. IBM is offering a very aggressive 1,000 points per core for Sun UltraSPARC and SPARC-based systems, HP Alpha and Itanium technology-based systems, and SGI MIPS trade ins.

Since HP will no longer guarantee they will sell PA-RISC-based HP Superdome systems after the end of the year, IBM is giving those customers a highly attractive alternative to HP's multi-year plea to migrate to Itanium technology-based HP Superdome. IBM is offering quadruple the Power Rewards points for PA-RISC-based system trade-ins -- or 4,000 per core, redeemable for up to $4,000 worth of no-charge IBM migration services -- to help those customers easily justify the migration to IBM.

A wide range of additional discounts on hardware, software or services are available and a reward points table is published for accumulating and redeeming Power Rewards. IBM will also re-use or recycle competitive HP or Sun servers in an eco-responsible manner.

IBM Global Technology Services offers a full complement of asset-based, standardized services for Power Systems, ranging from implementation to availability, virtualization and support, along with energy efficiency and security assessments, which allow clients to maximize their investment in IBM Power servers and software. Clients can also take advantage of PowerCare Services -- with the purchase of a Power 595 server, clients are eligible to select one of five PowerCare services options, free of charge.

Power™ Systems Software

IBM also introduced a new family of high availability solutions, called PowerHA, designed to help customers maximize system availability and performance for AIX, i and Linux operating systems through disk clustering, logical replication and other capabilities. For better alignment within the Power Systems Software portfolio, IBM High Availability Cluster Management Program for AIX and Linux will become PowerHA for AIX and PowerHA for Linux and the IBM High Availability Solutions Manager for i5/OS will become Power HAfor i.

As announced last week at the COMMON User Group Conference, the new Power Systems platform continues the decades long value of application compatibility for System i clients. Now, i clients can run their traditional applications unchanged alongside their new Web-based applications, on everything from blades to scalable servers based on the industry's fastest POWER6 processors.

Availability

The Power 595 supports AIX, the IBM UNIX operating system. Support for both IBM i and Linux is planned for the second half of 2008. IBM is offering attractively-priced upgrade options to allow clients to leverage their current investments in POWER5 processor-based 590 and 595 systems.

The Power 595 will be generally available on May 6.

About IBM

For more information about IBM, please visit www.ibm.com.

IBM is a trademark of IBM Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. All other company/product names and service marks may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies. UNIX is a registered trademark in the United States and other countries licensed exclusively through The Open Group. Linux is a trademark of Linus Torvald. SAP, mySAP and all SAP logos are trademarks or registered trademarks of SAP AG in Germany and in several other countries.

All performance comparisons current as of April 8, 2008.

(1) Results current as of 4/8/08; The 64-core IBM Power 595 (5.0 GHz) achieved the highest number of SAP SD Benchmark users on the two-tier SAP SD Standard Application Benchmark. Results are as follows: 35,400 SAP SD Benchmark users, 1.94 second average response time, 3,559,000 fully processed line items per hour, 10.677,000 dialog steps/hour, 177.950 SAPS, 0.013 sec / 0.017 sec Average database request time (dia/upd), 99% CPU utilization of central server. System configuration: 64-core IBM Power 595 (32 processors/64 cores/128 threads) running IBM DB2 Enterprise 9.5 database software, AIX 6.1, SAP ERP Release 6.0. The SAP certification number was not available at press time and can be found at www.sap.com/benchmark. The HP Integrity SD64B achieved 30,000 SAP SD Benchmark users on the two-tier SAP SD Standard Application Benchmark using HP/UX 11/V3 on 64 processor/128-core/256 thread 1.6 GHz Itanium 2 and Oracle 10gR2 running mySAP™ ERP 2005. SAP Certification number: 2006089. http://www.sap.com/benchmark

(2) Performance comparison based on SPECint_rate2006 64-core servers from IBM and HP. IBM result of 1650 for a 32 processor chip, 64-core, 128-thread 4.2GHz Power 595 with 256 GB of memory submitted to SPEC on April 8, 2008. HP result of 824 for a 32-processor chip, 64-core, 128-thread 1.6GHz Integrity Superdome with 256GB of memory viewable at www.spec.org. SPEC and the benchmark names SPECint_rate2006 is a registered trademarks of the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation.

(3) Competitive benchmark results reflect results published as of March 24, 2008. The results are the best IBM Power 595 64-core server result, the best 128-core and 64-core Sun SPARC Enterprise M9000 server results, and the best 128-core and 64-core HP Integrity Superdome results. SPEC® and the benchmark names SPECrate® and SPECint® are registered trademarks of the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation. For the latest SPEC benchmark results, visit http://www.spec.org. For details results of the benchmarks compared go to www.ibm.com/systems/migratetoibm/systems/power/performance.html.

(4) IBM Power Rewards offers 4,000 points per core for PA-RISC system trade-ins and 1,000 points per core for systems based on Itanium®, SPARC/UltraSPARC, Alpha or Mips up to a maximum determined by the type and price of the qualifying Power Systems purchased as the target of the migration. Each 15,000 points can be redeemed for 40 hours of IBM migration services from IBM or a qualified IBM Business Partner. Points can also be applied to PowerCare services and other qualifying IBM offerings as outlined here: www.ibm.com/systems/migratetoibm/systems/power/rewards.html.

(5) IDC Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker, Feb 2008.

(6) Superlinear scalability -- each time an SMP node is added it is not just connected to the previous node but point-to-point to all previous SMP nodes. So two nodes have one SMP inter-connect, three nodes have three SMP inter-connects (2+1), four nodes have six SMP inter-connects (3+2+1), five nodes have 10 inter-connects (4+3+2+1), six nodes have 15 inter-connects, seven nodes have 21 interconnects, and eight nodes have 28 inter-connects. So when then eight nodes needed to get to a full 64-core configuration are connected together there are actually 28 interconnects between those eight nodes -- point-to-point connecting every node to every node, providing massive amounts of bandwidth to gain maximum exploitation of the total system processor, memory and cache capability.

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Rick Bause
IBM Media Relations
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