IBM has announced new Power 5-based systems for SMEs this week claiming to shatter 15 world records in key benchmarks for entry-level Unix and Linux servers. Besides SMEs, IBM imagines them in branch locations running business- critical database applications in retail, wholesale, distribution and financial services.

IBM says the Power 5 systems include new easy-to-use software tools that make managing the servers a point-and-click operation with their Integrated Virtualization Manager and IBM Director 5.1.

The systems include a new eight-way for scale-up environments and server consolidation and dense rack form factors for e-mail, web, file and print serving and dense clustering in scale-out environments. IBM says they are equipped with new "scale within" capabilities because of the virtualization.

IBM is selling them with the AIX 5L, Red Hat or SUSE operating systems. It notes that they can be partitioned to run both Unix and Linux.

The line includes the p5 550Q, which IBM says uses the industry's first Quad Core Module for database applications and delivers the fastest eight-way SPECjbb2005 results ever recorded. The 1.5GHz quad-core Power 5+ processor package can reportedly run up to twice as many workloads as old four-way 550 servers.

Then there's the 520, which IBM calls the fastest two-way Java business server in the business, designed as a small database server or a branch applications server, and for highly secure e-business and business intelligence (BI) and high-performance computing (HPC) applications.

The p5 550 is a four-way database server with 1.9GHz Power 5+ dual-core modules that can function as a scalable database or departmental or regional server. IBM deems it a "strategic platform" for scalable database servers, e-commerce application servers, web servers, operations systems, and for BI and HPC workloads.

IBM also claims the 550 is the fastest four-way Java business and web application server and the fastest four-processor SAP SD 2-tier application server on the Linux OS.

The p5 505 is a new one- and two-way 1U rack server based on 1.5GHz and 1.65GHz Power 5 chips for scale-out implementations. It delivers twice the storage and memory capacity and faster SPECfp performance than the Sun Fire X4100, says IBM.

The company also announced a new HPC system, the 575, designed for supercomputing applications and intensive numerical calculation with over 50% more performance than the eight-way p5-575 and capable of sustaining 87.3 GFLOP/s as a 192- processor node cluster, and the IntelliStation Power 285, the first Power 5+ workstation, which is supposed to offer more than twice the performance of the Sun Blade 2500.

The 505 starts at $3,684, the 520 at $11,699 for a two-way 1.9GHz minimum configuration, the 550 at $14,053 for a two-way 1.9GHz minimum configuration, and the-550Q at $19,048 for a four-way 1.5GHz minimum configuration.

While the IBM Director 5.10 systems management software won't be available until November 25, the boxes should be available on October 14.

This report is based on an item that appeared originally in Client Server News.