IBM readies'System p'Power6-based servers

...Speaking of the "world's fastest chip," turns out that Sun's Niagara 2 isn't the only game in town. We've been hearing about IBM's advanced Power6 platform for a while and now, it looks like some hardware is finally ready to ship. The company demoed its new line of "System p" servers for the data center in San Francisco yesterday, calling the dual-core, four-thread Power6 chips inside "the fastest in the world." Hmm, either IBM is trying to one-up Sun or Big Blue lives on another planet...

During the demonstration, IBM showed off how an administrator could move "an entire partition housing an Oracle database-working in full production and completing between 10,000 and 11,000 transaction per hour-from a four-core, Power6 physical machine to another Power6 machine with 12 cores"--in real time. Big Blue is hoping that enterprises will use the Power6 core to consolidate processing power in one server enclosure, as opposed to running multiple commodity servers. "The System p 570 can ramp up from four cores, to eight, 12, or 16 core-and it looks just like one big server," said Scott Handy, IBM Vice President of Worldwide Linux Strategy. "You just snap them together as you need them. You get really screaming performance and lots of memory-48GB per core."

For more on System p:
- see this eWeek article