The Power 730 Express server is a two-socket server offering 8, 12 or 16 POWER7 cores in a dense, 2U rack-optimised form factor. The Power 730 Express server is a high-performance, reliable and energy-efficient server fueled by the outstanding performance of the POWER7 processor supporting a choice of AIX, IBM i or Linux operating systems. Combine that performance and operating system support with industrial-strength PowerVM™ and the workload-optimising capabilities available with the POWER7 processor and you’re now ready to run multiple application and infrastructure workloads in a virtualised environment while driving higher utilisation and reducing costs.

Overview

Highlights

  • High performance, dense and energy-efficient server ideal for running multiple application and infrastructure workloads in a virtualised environment
  • Consolidation of UNIX® and x86 Linux® workloads.

Organisations of all sizes are struggling with rising energy prices and limited resources. They are running out of space and exceeding power thresholds in computer rooms and data centres. And, they are increasingly being asked to do more with less. The Power 730 Express is designed with innovative workload-optimising and energy management technologies to help clients get the most out of their systems; that is, running applications fast and energy efficiently to conserve energy and reduce infrastructure costs.

The IBM Power 730 Express server delivers the outstanding performance of the POWER7 processor in a dense, rack-optimised form factor and is ideal for running multiple application and infrastructure workloads in a virtualised environment. Take advantage of the Power 730 Express servers’ scalability and capacity by leveraging our industrial strength PowerVM technology to fully utilise the servers’ capability. PowerVM offers this capability to dynamically adjust system resources to partitions based on workload demands, enabling a dynamic infrastructure (DI) that can dramatically reduce server sprawl via consolidation of applications and servers.

The Power 730 Express server is a two-socket high performance, reliable and energy-efficient server supporting up to sixteen POWER7 cores and a choice of AIX, IBM i or Linux operating systems. Combine the outstanding performance with PowerVM and the workload-optimising capabilities of POWER7 and you are now ready to run multiple application and infrastructure workloads in a virtualised environment while driving higher utilisation and reducing costs.

 

Feature Benefits
Superb POWER7 performance
  • Access data faster and improve response time
  • Do more work with fewer servers and benefit from infrastructure cost savings from a reduction in the number of servers and software licences
IBM Systems Director Active Energy Manager with EnergyScale Technology
  • Dramatically and dynamically improve energy efficiency and lower energy costs with innovative energy management capabilities
  • Enables businesses to continue operations when energy is limited
PowerVM Virtualisation
  • Easily add workloads as your business grows
  • Utilise the full capability of the system to reduce infrastructure costs by consolidating workloads running the AIX, IBM i or Linux operating systems
  • Provides ability to handle unexpected workload peaks by sharing resources
Intelligent Threads
  • Optimise performance by selecting the suitable threading mode for your application
Active Memory Expansion
  • Enables more work to be done with existing server resources
RAS Features
  • Keep applications up and running so you can focus on growing your business
Light Path Diagnostics
  • Easily and quickly diagnose hardware problems reducing service time.

 

Specification
Power 730 Express at a glance
Configuration options
POWER7 processor modules – two per system Eight-core 3.0 GHz or

Eight-core 3.7 GHz or

12-core 3.7 GHz or

16-core 3.55 GHz
Sockets 2
Level 2 (L2) cache 256 KB per core
Level 3 (L3) cache 4 MB per core
Memory 8 GB to 256 GB1 of registered dual inline memory module (RDIMM) double data rate 3 (DDR3)

Active Memory Expansion
Solid State Drives (SSD) Up to six small form factor (SFF) drives
Disk drives Up to six SFF serial attached SCSI (SAS) drives
Disk capacity Up to 3.6 TB
Media bays Slimline for DVD-RAM

Half height for tape drive2 or removable disk
I/O Model 8231-E2B Model 8231-E2C
PCI Adapter slots Four PCI Express 8x low profile Five PCI Express 8x Generation2 low profile
Standard Ethernet Four virtual Ethernet 10/100/1000 Megabits per second (Mbps) ports

(or)

Two virtual 10 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) ports		 Two Ethernet 10/100/1000 Mbps ports
Integrated SAS controller One controller for SAS direct access storage device (DASD)/SSD and DVD-RAM

Optional protected 175 MB cache with redundant array of independent disk (RAID) 5, 6		 One controller for SAS DASD/SSD with RAID 10 and DVD-RAM

Optional protected 175 MB cache with RAID 5, 6
High performance PCI adapters 8 Gigabit Fibre Channel (FC)

10 GbE

10 Gigabit FC over Ethernet (FCoE)		 8 Gigabit FC

Dual port 10 GbE

10 Gigabit FCoE

Dual port QDR Infiniband
Expansion features (optional) Storage Expansion up to 102 total SFF bays Storage Expansion up to 378 total SFF bays

Up to 20 PCIe slots
Other integrated ports Three universal serial bus (USB), two hardware management console (HMC), two system ports, two SPCN
GX slots Two GX++
PowerVM technologies
POWER Hypervisor LPAR, Dynamic LPAR, Virtual local area network (VLAN) (Memory-to-memory interpartition communication)
PowerVM Express Edition (optional) Up to three partitions on the server; PowerVM Lx86; VMControl, virtualised disk and optical devices (VIOS); Integrated Virtualisation Manager (IVM); Shared Dedicated Capacity
PowerVM Standard Edition (optional) PowerVM Express Edition plus Micro-Partitioning with up to 10 micropartitions per processor; Multiple Shared Processor Pools
PowerVM Enterprise Edition (optional) PowerVM Standard Edition plus Live Partition Mobility and Active Memory Sharing
RAS features Error checking and correction (ECC) memory with Chipkill

Processor Instruction Retry

Alternate Processor Recovery

Service processor with fault monitoring

Hot-plug disk bays

Hot-plug and redundant power supplies and cooling fans

Dynamic component Deallocation
Operating systems3 AIX

IBM i

Linux for POWER
High availability (HA) IBM PowerHA family
Power requirements 200 V to 240 V ac, single phase
System dimensions Rack Drawer: 3.4 in. H × 17.6 in. W × 28.6 in. D (86 mm × 447 mm × 728 mm); weight 65 lbs (29.5 kg)4
Warranty (limited) Three year Limited Warranty, on-site for selected components; customer replaceable unit (CRU) for all other units (varies by country), Next Business Day nine to five (excluding holidays), warranty service upgrades and maintenance are available
 

1 128GB maximum memory for Power 730 Model 8231-E2B

2 Tape support results in 3 SFF bays, 1 tape bay and 1 DVD

3 See facts and features document for detailed operating system level support.

4 Weight will vary when disks, adapters and peripherals are added.