14 DAY TRIAL // While the first Power6 processors were launched in June by IBM, the company now decided to share some information about their internal workings in the System p line of servers. The most recent addition to the list of features of the Power6 Unix based processors is the ability to move around a workload from one server to the next while it is being processed. IBM call this feature Live Partition Mobility and it is intended to work in a virtualization environment by replicating memory pages from one partition to another; and because it works at a low hardware level, it is transparent to the host and guest operating systems or the applications that run on top of them.
As IBM's System p line of servers are all Unix centered, the Live Partition Mobility feature of the Power6 processors works best when used to transport workloads running on AIX or Linux based operating systems, including popular Linux distributions like Red Hat and Novell SUSE Linux. According to Anton Blanchard from IBM, who was cited by the Web news site InfoWorld, "Virtualization software company VMWare has the same capability in its VMotion product but IBM is the first to offer the capability on servers running Unix". He also demonstrated the Live Partition Mobility feature by moving an application form one server to another in just a few minutes and said that the whole point in this technology is to avoid the downtime needed to manually move one application between servers.
IBM cited the The Sageza Group research firm which said in a report that the Live Partition Mobility feature of its Power6 processors may help servers run as a single computing entity, where applications may be shifted around in order to avoid any downtimes and to improve performance. For now, the Live Partition Mobility feature is in a beta testing phase and it will be generally available later this year, according to Scott Handy, vice president of worldwide marketing and strategy for IBM's System p line of servers.
The new IBM processor, the Power6, is a 64 bit, dual-core processor that can run at up to 4.7GHz and it was intended for the System p 570 model of servers. This line of servers is targeted at data centers that wish to consolidate their disparate servers into a single platform. On the server market IBM's System p has to compete against similarly oriented servers built by HP (codenamed Integrity, running Itanium class processors) and Sun (SunFire servers built around the new UltraSparc T2 processor, also known as the Niagara 2 chip).