14 DAY TRIAL // From the very beginning of the computer industry IBM was the leader on the mainframe and server departments and this trend is keeping even today as the big blue company faces strong competition from equally well-established and known hardware manufacturers like HP and Dell. While IBM remains the top server and mainframe vendor in the whole world, HP is not that far behind and as a new battle between the two companies looms nearer, IBM decided to make public a new range of results from benchmarking its servers against a wide range of technical and commercial applications.
IBM is manufacturing both x86 compatible servers as well as machines equipped with its own Power6 processors that are intended to run in an Unix computing environment. According to the news site serverbulletin, IBM posted leading benchmarking results on the entire line of configurations like the 1-core, 4-core, 8-core and 16-core servers running either Linux or the IBM UNIX operating system, AIX. "IBM System p servers supply industry-leading performance on both operating systems, providing customers the opportunity to reduce energy costs by consolidating smaller, less-efficient servers," said Scott Handy, vice president of worldwide marketing for System p servers at IBM.
The latest in a long line of IBM servers, the System p 570 machine, achieved record results during the SPECfp_2006 and per core SPECfp_rate2006 benchmarks which are intended to determine the speed and the throughput of floating point units. The SPECfp_2006 benchmark is designed to measure the speed of a processor and using that benchmark a single core Power6 processor with a running frequency of 4.7GHz which was mounted in a System p 570 server and which used the SUSE Linux operating system, scored no less that 22.4. this score is considered to be the highest in the whole server industry as the System p 570's results are 23 percent higher than the ones registered by an HP Integrity rx6600 running HP-UX which scored only 18.1. Using the SPECfp_rate2006 benchmark, a quad core( two processors ) IBM System p 570 server running the AIX operating system scored 115 versus 51.3 for an HP Proliant DL585 G2 with two 3.0 GHz AMD processors (4 cores) running SUSE Linux.
When using the very same benchmarking applications and increasing the number of cores on the IBM System p 570 servers, the results continued their ascending trend leaving the HP server systems far behind. "The System p 570 running the POWER6 microprocessor was designed from the ground up to be a balanced system, with massive bandwidth to accommodate the machine's incredible speed," said Handy. "These benchmark results indicate the kind of performance that will help enable customers to create the efficient data centers of the future."