
4405ch01 General description.fm
Draft Document for Review May 22, 2009 3:10 pm
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IBM Power 570 Technical Overview and Introduction
processor also includes an AltiVec SIMD accelerator, which helps to improve the performance
of high performance computing (HPC) workloads.
All Power Systems servers can utilize logical partitioning (LPAR) technology implemented
using System p virtualization technologies, the operating system (OS), and a hardware
management console (HMC). Dynamic LPAR allows clients to dynamically allocate many
system resources to application partitions without rebooting, allowing up to 16 dedicated
processor partitions on a fully configured system.
In addition to the base virtualization that is standard on every System p server, two optional
virtualization features are available on the server: PowerVM Standard Edition (formerly
Advanced POWER Virtualization (APV) Standard) and PowerVM Enterprise Edition (formerly
APV Enterprise).
PowerVM Standard Edition includes IBM Micro-Partitioning™ and Virtual I/O Server (VIOS)
capabilities. Micro-partitions can be defined as small as 1/10th of a processor and be
changed in increments as small as 1/100th of a processor. Up to 160 micro-partitions may be
created on a 16-core 570 system. VIOS allows for the sharing of disk and optical devices and
communications and Fibre Channel adapters. Also included is support for Multiple Shared
Processor Pools and Shared Dedicated Capacity.
PowerVM Enterprise Edition includes all features of PowerVM Standard Edition plus Live
Partition Mobility, newly available with POWER6 systems. It is designed to allow a partition to
be relocated from one server to another while end users are using applications running in the
partition.
Other features introduced with POWER6 processor-based technology include an Integrated
Virtual Ethernet adapter standard with every system, the Processor Instruction Retry feature
automatically monitoring the POWER6 processor and, if needed, restarting the processor
workload without disruption to the application, and a new HMC (Hardware Management
Console) graphical user interface offering enhanced systems control.