The new offerings provide a clear alternative to HP, Sun and other competitive systems by helping customers consolidate their data centres or departmental workloads, increase operational efficiencies, and reduce energy costs.

More and more companies are choosing IBM Power Systems servers to simplify their IT infrastructures. According to International Data Corporation (IDC), in 2Q08 IBM UNIX grew revenue 25.8% YTY, outpacing all others, outgrowing HP by 2 to 1 with Sun in decline. Clients are using innovative IBM solutions, services, virtualization, and the technology that produced POWER6, the world's fastest microprocessor, to manage a broad variety of business applications - from multiple servers in the large data centre to standalone computers supporting the small business franchise.

For example, IBM has launched a new Power 570 with more than twice the performance per core and more than twice the performance per watt as HP's Superdome.

As the world's most popular midrange server, the IBM Power 570, now offers more energy efficiency and consolidation options with new processor cards that double the number of cores in the same system footprint. Starting at just 4 cores, the system can be upgraded to a full 32-core single system image (32-core SMP); and with hot-node add, businesses can install more server modules without having to take the system down when the time comes for growth.

IBM also announced that the Power 570/16, which supports from 2 to 16 POWER6 cores, now features faster speeds of 4.4 GHz and even 5.0 GHz - the fastest of the POWER6 processors - previously available only in the top of the line Power 595.

With twice the number of cores for performance and efficiency packed into the same system footprint as previous 570 systems, the Power 570/32 gives users more than 2.4 times the performance per watt compared to the Sun M8000 system.

The Power 560 Express, a commercial computer system, is a new POWER6 server model that sits between the Power 550 and Power 570. The Power 560 features 4-, 8- and 16-core configurations and is designed to help businesses consolidate multiple UNIX, i or x86 workloads onto less footprints.

The Power 560 can save companies up to $840,000 and 83 percent in energy by consolidating 13 Sun Fire V490 servers on a single Power 560 server with PowerVM, as compared to consolidating the same number on four Sun SPARC Enterprise M5000 servers with dynamic system domains.

The Power 560 Express provides an 80-percent performance boost and 60-percent performance per watt improvement compared to a 16-core HP Integrity rx7640.

IBM also introduced:

• The Power 520 Express and Power 550 Express, providing new 4- and 8-core options for i editions. AIX and Linux users can now add i on the same system.
• The JS12 blade server running on IBM BladeCenter can now be pre-installed with i and easily attached to low cost DS3200 storage to create a SAN.
• Enhanced RAS features for hot-node add and repair for Power 570 and Power 595 servers, allowing concurrent repair of one node while the system continues to operate, even while PowerHA is mirroring transactions across multiple systems and storage.

The new Power 570/32, 570/16, and 560, expanded capabilities of the Power 550 and 520 systems and the new SAN options on blades all run any combination of AIX, i, and Red Hat or Novell Linux.

Enhanced Power Systems software for AIX, i and Linux, includes:

• A beta version of PowerVM Active Memory Sharing, new virtualization software that helps clients improve memory utilization by pooling resources between partitions.
• IBM Systems Director, a new foundation for enterprise platform management, spanning multiple platforms and operating environments. Systems Director helps clients deploy, monitor, analyse, optimize and update Power server and storage physical and virtual resources running any combination of AIX, i or Linux workloads. Systems Director is managed through an intuitive graphical interface and provides upward integration to enterprise service management tools, including IBM Tivoli.
• A new version of Active Energy Manager, an extension to IBM Systems Director, featuring advanced energy control options designed to boost performance per watt by slowing processor clock speed or even putting processors in "nap" mode when not in use. It also allows users to set an energy cap a for a single POWER6 server, or even across a pool of POWER6-based servers.
• PowerHA for AIX, enhanced with asynchronous GLVM support that enables geographic dispersion of systems to improve business resiliency and disaster recovery.
• A new release of IBM iCluster, a high-availability solution based on logical replication, that integrates with IBM i service and fix management tools.
• A new distribution agreement with Vision Solutions for IBM to distribute Vision Cluster1, Vision's flagship enterprise cluster management solution for IBM i.
• New and updated Rational software for the i operating environment that helps geographically-distributed software delivery teams collaborate.

In addition to IBM Systems Director, IBM recently introduced AIX Enterprise Edition to help UNIX clients discover applications and server relationships, monitor and report service status, manage workload partitions (WPARs), and enable cost analysis of server usage. Systems Director and AIX Enterprise Edition have been designed to provide a full platform management solution for UNIX servers, and to integrate with IBM Tivoli tools for enterprise service management.

"Today's broad set of announcements span performance, virtualization, energy efficiency, availability and management and demonstrate convincingly that IBM is clearly the smart choice for businesses looking to reduce total IT costs, including the often more expensive operational aspects", stated Scott Handy, vice president of worldwide marketing and strategy, IBM Power Systems. "With new servers and our systems software offerings moving higher up the customer value chain, we're continuing to demonstrate the added value we provide to customers when compared to HP and Sun."

"We are offering customers more attractive total infrastructure solutions whether they are replacing one workload at a time in a department or are consolidating, simplifying and integrating their IT and moving to a shared infrastructure approach that supports tens or hundreds of applications from one or more groups of users or lines of business."

Zappos.com is an on-line retailer stocking more than one million pairs of shoes and handbags, with selections from more than 1800 brand names. With a focus on service, the company has grown rapidly since its inception in 1999, with sales more than doubling year-over-year, every year since Zappos.com was founded.

From servers to storage, Zappos.com is a true blue customer. IBM Power 570 systems running Linux host the Zappos.com databases, providing the performance and capability required to meet the challenging daily demands of this successful Internet retailer. IBM BladeCenter, IBM System Storage and IBM WebSphere technologies are also deployed by Zappos.com, working with IBM Premier Business Partner Sycomp.

Currently, the company is in the process of updating its disaster recovery site with IBM POWER6 microprocessors and plans to take advantage of IBM Live Partition Mobility continuous availability capabilities for new application development and testing.

"Our number one core value is to deliver 'wow' through service, and we've been committed to outstanding service for Zappos online buyers since day one", stated Kris Ongbongan, systems manager at Zappos.com. "We evaluated a variety of vendor solutions and determined that the IBM solution was the right one for us. IBM Power Systems have enabled the infrastructure to grow with our business and have far exceeded our expectations on every front."

As industry studies demonstrate, IBM continues to lengthen its lead in revenue share for UNIX and RISC + Itanium (R+I) servers. According to IDC, IBM gained 5.1 points of revenue share with 25.8% growth YTY in 2Q08 for UNIX servers, and holds the nr. 1 position with 35.7% revenue share, +4.6 points ahead of nr. Sun and nearly 10 points (9.9) ahead of HP. In fact, IBM is the only major UNIX vendor to gain revenue share in the past five years, picking up points while both HP and Sun lost share. IBM's nr. 1 position is even stronger in the 20 designated growth segments.

And in the R+I server space, which features IBM Power Systems servers running on AIX, Linux and i, IBM continues to gain revenue share at the expense of HP and Sun.

Through its Power Systems Migration Factory offering, IBM has helped nearly 1200 customers migrate from competitive Sun, HP and other platforms to IBM's AIX or Linux on Power, resulting in more than $1 billion in revenues.

IBM has demonstrated that robust and mature technologies such as virtualization have become a key factor in the customer-buying decision. IBM recently reported that a threefold increase in customer adoption of virtualization on its unified Power Systems line of servers is being fueled by customers consolidating additional partitions onto existing servers. This significant leap in the uptake of virtualization - 64 percent in the second quarter alone - exceeds by a large margin levels common on x86 systems.

Overall, IBM Power Systems with POWER6 technology have recorded more than 70 industry-leading performance benchmarks.