IBM has announced new POWER7 systems designed to manage the most demanding workloads and emerging applications, including a high-end system that offers markedly better energy efficiency than competitive systems from HP and Oracle. IBM also announced a pair of developments that illustrate the company's continued momentum for Power in the $13 billion UNIX market, in which IBM has experienced a 14-point revenue share gain since 2005.

IBM has achieved the industry's highest ever TPC-C (transaction processing) benchmark using a Power Systems configuration with DB2, hitting 10,366,254 transactions per minute, which beat HP's best result by more than 2.5 times and Oracle's best by more than 35%.

The new systems – servers, software and IBM's industry-leading PowerVM virtualization capabilities – allow customers to better manage ever-increasing amounts of data in an interconnected world and to conserve energy and floor space in burdened data centers. They are part of a year-long rollout by IBM of workload-optimized systems for the demands of emerging business models such as smart electrical grids, real-time analytics in financial markets and healthcare, mobile telecommunications, and smarter traffic systems.

The new POWER7 technology supports four times as many processor cores as prior systems and uses the latest PowerVM virtualization software to allow customers to run over 1,000 virtual servers on a single physical system, enabling a substantial improvement in operating efficiency. For the many customers nearing capacity limits for energy, space and cooling in data centers, consolidating older systems to the new high-end Power 795 could result in more headroom – with energy reductions of up to 75% for equivalent performance capacity – allowing for workload growth in existing data centers and helping companies to potentially avoid or reduce the cost of expanding or building new data centers.

The four Express servers announced today – IBM Power 710, 720, 730 and 740 Express – offer mid-market clients the outstanding performance, energy efficiency and other benefits of POWER7 technology in compact rack-mount or tower packages. These high-density, cost efficient servers minimize complexity and provide the memory capacity, internal storage options, I/O expandability and RAS features needed for demanding workloads in today's high-growth midsize business.

Attractively priced starting at $6,385 and available from IBM and IBM Business Partners, these easy-to-order IBM Express models allow clients to choose the configuration that satisfies their requirements and receive half the processor core activations at no additional charge. The new Express servers run over 15,000 applications based on AIX, IBM i and Linux operating systems. PowerVM software is also optionally available on the four new Express models, allowing clients to consolidate multiple workloads on one or more servers.