Customers Go Green Using IBM Virtualization to Consolidate UNIX and x86 Workloads to Linux on POWER-Based Servers

Volkswagen AG, Telefonica Moviles España Move Multiple Servers Onto IBM Platform to Become More Energy Efficient.

SAN FRANCISCO, CA.-At LinuxWorld here today, IBM (NYSE: IBM) announced that dozens of customers -- including Volkswagen AG and Telefonica Moviles -- have recently selected Linux on POWER for consolidating their UNIX and x86 workloads to IBM’s System p servers as they seek to maximize their IT investments and become more energy efficient. When combined with those customers migrating from competitive platforms to IBM’s AIX UNIX operating system on System p, the migrations to Linux on POWER are part of a broader overall increase in adoption of System p servers that bring the total migrations to more than 700 since the start of 2006, including over 250 this year alone.
For example, Volkswagen AG, a global automobile manufacturer based in Germany, has consolidated from 76 competitive UNIX servers down to six System p5 570 servers running Linux in order to significantly reduce total cost of ownership while boosting speed to market. Volkswagen’s strategy has allowed the company to implement a more manageable and scalable underlying hardware and software solution architecture, enabling the automobile manufacturer to quickly respond to changing market conditions.

“The move to System p has enabled us to be more responsive to customer needs in the fluctuating automobile market,” said Wolfgang Petersen, IT Services, Volkswagen AG. “Collaborating with IBM helps us align innovative products and services and get them to market faster to meet customer demand. We’ve been able to boost our efficiency levels with faster standardized processes and operations.”

Another customer, Telefonica Moviles España, the largest mobile operator in Spain, is now implementing a strategy to streamline the IT architecture used for its mobile business. Telefonica Moviles España is working to consolidate value-added services applications on two System p5 595 servers running the Linux operating system.

“We are innovating to define a new reference architecture that allow us to reduce the deploying speed of new services for our customers. IBM System p platform with the virtualization capabilities has become a key piece of our strategy,” said, Miguel Angel García Hafner, technology manager for Value Added Services in Telefonica Moviles España. “Consolidating our workloads on Linux on POWER has been an easy process and is helping us to significantly lower operational costs, reducing dramatically the IT complexity.”

Workload consolidations are designed to reduce cost, power and space and simplify management and operations of customer infrastructures.

Moving UNIX and x86 workloads to Linux on POWER
The number of Linux on POWER applications continues to expand -- currently there are nearly 3,000 applications running natively on Linux on POWER-based System p servers. In addition, IBM’s System p Application Virtual Environment (System p AVE) is designed to allow thousands more x86 Linux binaries to run unmodified and without recompilation on System p servers. Supplementing native Linux on POWER applications with the ability to also consolidate Linux x86 application binaries on System p is designed to greatly increase customer options for workload consolidation, simplifying and optimizing their IT environments.

To help accelerate these customer consolidations, since April 23 IBM has been offering a beta version of p AVE, a new translation software technology, through a worldwide Web-based download free of charge to customers, IBM business partners and independent software vendors (ISVs). More than 150 companies representing 30 countries have already downloaded this unique virtualization solution designed to consolidate x86 Linux workloads on System p servers.

Telefonica Moviles España has already tested the p AVE beta and plans to put it into full production. Customers and ISVs can download and test the beta version of p AVE at no charge by going to: http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/p/linux/systempave.html. IBM intends to make this capability generally available in the second half of 2007, according to a statement of direction issued a year ago.(1)

“IBM is seeing clients go green by consolidating UNIX and x86 workloads on Linux on System p to save money with operational efficiencies and by using less energy, cooling and floor space,” said Scott Handy, IBM vice president of worldwide marketing and strategy for IBM Power Systems. “With Solaris, HP/UX and now x86 workloads moving to System p, we are extending our lead in UNIX servers. According to IDC, IBM System p servers have gained more than 12 points of revenue share over the past five years on a rolling four-quarter basis, including five points from HP and three points from Sun, to become the number one UNIX server in terms of customer revenue.”

Twelve new Linux leadership benchmarks
IBM has already demonstrated the performance capabilities of the System p 570 through 25 leadership benchmark results running on the AIX operating system.(2) Today, IBM is announcing 12 new benchmark results on the System p 570 server running with the Linux operating system. Four of these results have set overall leadership in their class, while the other eight have achieved the distinction of “Best of Linux.” (2)

Featuring the new POWER6 processor, a 16-core IBM System p 570 running the Linux operating system achieved 2.5 times the performance on the SPECint_rate2006 benchmark, a popular indicator of infrastructure and computational scalability, than a similarly configured HP rx8640 Itanium-2 system also running the Linux OS.(3) Supporting three times more memory than the HP system in a maximum configuration, System p 570 provides the capacity to consolidate and manage many more applications, even ones which have high memory and processor requirements.

And, the System p570 is one server that is equipped for consolidation. IBM calculates that 15 HP Integrity rx7640 systems can be consolidated into a single rack of the IBM System p570 running with the Linux operating system, saving more than $25,000 per year on energy costs alone.4

High performance computing solutions
In other news, IBM announced new releases of the General Parallel File System (GFPS) Version 3.2 and the Engineering and Scientific Subroutine Library (ESSL) Version 4.3

The new release of GPFS offers improvements in scalability and performance, installability, manageability, monitoring and availability. GPFS provides fast, reliable, and scalable access to structured and unstructured data. For example GPFS can support access speeds of 130+GB/sec to a single file on a two petabyte file system. It addresses the needs of the most demanding commercial customers by providing storage consolidation, file virtualization and simplified policy-based file management. GPFS also continues to offer leadership(5) in high-end technical and high performance computing (HPC) by supporting multi-petabytes of storage and hundreds or thousands of nodes in a single file system. For more information on GPFS, please visit http://www.ibm.com/systems/clusters/software/gpfs.html.

ESSL Version 4.3 provides new run-time libraries. ESSL is a collection of highly optimized state-of-the-art mathematical subroutines specifically tuned to IBM hardware that is designed to provide significant performance improvement to any math-intensive scientific or engineering applications. For more information on ESSL, please visit http://www.ibm.com/systems/p/software/essl.html.

Both releases include support of the System p 570 server and the RHEL5 and SLES10 Linux operating systems