IBM has produced a new range of systems saying they are capable of handling massive amounts of computational data faster at nearly 20% better price/performance than comparable Intel Xeon v3 Processor-based systems and will provide a superior alternative to closed, commodity-based datacentre servers.
The vastness of Big Data – of the 2.5 quintillion bytes of data generated on the planet every day – provides a challenge for organizations to build powerful technology infrastructures to gain actionable insights from this data.
The commodity servers used today by most organizations, according to reports, are built on proprietary processor technology and are increasingly stretched to their limits by workloads related to Big Data, cloud and mobile demands.
In contrast, IBM is designing a new datacentric approach to systems that leverages the building blocks of the OpenPOWER Foundation.
Formed in late 2013, the OpenPOWER Foundation has grown quickly from 5 founders to 59 members – all working together to leverage the IBM POWER processor’s open architecture for broad industry innovation.
“Our open innovation business model and approach to OpenPOWER will disrupt technology providers that offer closed, proprietary solutions produced within the walls of one company,” said Doug Balog, general manager, Power Systems, IBM Systems & Technology Group. “Today’s announcement provides clients with a greater choice to help them gain the fastest, deepest insights to solve their business problems.”
The new IBM Power S824L servers are built on IBM’s POWER8 processor, the world’s first processor optimized for the most demanding Big Data workloads.
The new systems tightly integrate IBM and other OpenPOWER member technologies, including NVIDIA’s GPU accelerator technology for the first time, to unleash incredible computing performance to help enable banks to better analyse risk, energy companies to more precisely locate oil reserves, and scientists to more quickly identify cures for diseases.
Future versions of IBM Power Systems will feature NVIDIA NVLink technology, eliminating the need to transfer data between the CPU and GPUs over the PCI Express interface.
This will enable NVIDIA GPUs to access IBM POWER CPU memory at its full bandwidth, improving performance for numerous enterprise applications.
Such systems are expected to be available beginning in 2016.