Easily scale up to 128 cores with the IBM Power 780. Unique IBM modular SMP architecture lets you add more powerful POWER7+™ processing capability exactly when needed. Innovative RAS features and leadership virtualization capabilities make the 780 well suited as an application or database server, or for server consolidation. And the flexibility to use the leading-edge AIX, IBM i and Linux operating systems broadens the application offerings available and increases the ways clients can manage growth, complexity and risk.

Overview

Highlights

  • Delivers the utmost in infrastructure efficiency at enterprise scale, with flexible delivery models and dynamic resource management that can increase utilization while reducing operational costs.
  • Delivers trusted information across the enterprise, ensuring continuous transaction availability and enabling real-time business analytics.
  • Provides the highest levels of security, ensuring the integrity of critical information while mitigating risk and meeting regulatory compliance mandates
  • Ideal platform for private cloud deployments

The planet is getting smaller, flatter and smarter every day. Global market segments are connected like never before. Economic shock waves, both good and bad, travel the globe in nanoseconds. Newer, smarter technologies arrive daily. New business models are born, and old ones die, in the blink of an eye. We are in the midst of an important technology shift driving growth and innovation—built on the confluence of big data, cloud, mobile devices and social business. In order to survive businesses need to be flexible, resilient, and dedicated to the success of their clients. This era presents a defining moment for businesses to reshape the value they deliver through the customer experience. And the best of these successful businesses have IT infrastructures that consist of enterprise systems that are highly secure and designed for the utmost availability of critical data. They are managed with the maximum cost efficiency and address exponential growth in enterprise data, demand for new services, and integration of legacy systems with the new digital face of the business.

In today’s IT environment, performance has been redefined to mean delivering services faster, with higher quality and with superior economics. The emerging measures of IT performance are around infrastructure efficiency, information availability and security of data. IT is measured on providing an infrastructure that can handle rapid growth and manage business risk while meeting higher required service levels. And of course it is expected that new services will be delivered with tighter budget constraints—with IT expected to do more with less. Designed for virtualized consolidation of business critical workloads, the IBM® Power® 780 delivers on performance, availability, efficiency and virtualization in a way that is unique in the industry. PowerVM® virtualization enables continuous, dynamic resource adjustments across all partitions and operating environments, independent of physical placement, to optimize performance while minimizing energy usage. Supported environments include AIX®, IBM i, Linux for Power applications, all on the same system.

 

Feature Benefits
Industry-leading POWER7+ performance
  • Better customer satisfaction due to improved response time to your customers
  • Infrastructure cost savings from a reduction in the number of servers and software costs
  • Improved efficiency in operations from consolidating multiple workloads on fewer systems
Exceptional PowerVM virtualization capability
  • Improves system efficiency, which lowers operational expense
  • Provides flexibility in responding to changing business requirements
  • Enables energy savings and maintains application availability
  • Provides ability to handle unexpected workload peaks by sharing resources
  • Enables consolidation of multiple AIX, IBM i and Linux workloads
Mainframe-inspired availability features
  • Better customer satisfaction due to improved application availability
  • Get more work done with less disruption to your business
  • Faster repair when required due to sophisticated system diagnostics
  • Participation in a Power System Pool to reduce planned downtime
Nondisruptive growth options
  • Enables your system to change with your business without forcing everything to stop
  • Aligns expense with usage without sacrificing performance or future growth options
Frugal EnergyScale™ technology
  • Helps lower energy costs without sacrificing performance or business flexibility
  • Allows business to continue operations when energy is limited
Innovative Active Memory™ Expansion
  • Enables more work to be performed with existing resources
  • Partition level control enables flexibility and optimization for workload
Broad business application support
  • Allows clients the flexibility to select the right application to meet their needs
  • Helps keep you in the mainstream and off the bleeding edge

 

Specification
Configuration Options Per building block System maximum
Processors Four 3.72 GHz POWER7+ processor modules with eight cores each or
Four 4.42 GHz POWER7+ processor modules with four cores each		 Sixteen 3.72 GHz POWER7+ processor modules with eight cores each or
Sixteen 4.42 GHz POWER7+ processor modules with four cores each
Sockets Four Sixteen
Level 2 (L2) cache 256 KB L2 cache per core 256 KB L2 cache per core
Level 3 (L3) cache 10 MB L3 cache per core (eDRAM) 10 MB L3 cache per core (eDRAM)
Enterprise Memory Up to 1 TB of 1066 MHz DDR3
Active Memory Expansion		 Up to 4 TB of 1066 MHz DDR3
Active Memory Expansion
Integrated SAS bays for Solid State Drives (SSD) or Hard Disk Drives (HDD) Up to six SFF SAS drive bays Up to 24 SFF SAS drive bays
Disk drives Up to six SFF SAS drives Up to 24 SFF SAS drives
Integrated media bays One slimline for SATA DVD-RAM Four slimline for SATA DVD-RAMs
Integrated PCI adapter slots Six PCIe Gen2 slots 24 PCIe Gen2 slots
Integrated multifunction card One per enclosure:
  • Dual 10 Gb + Dual 1 Gb
 Up to four per system:
  • Dual 10 Gb + Dual 1 Gb
Integrated SAS controllers Two SAS DASD/SSD controllers
One SATA media controller		 Eight SAS DASD/SSD controllers
Four SATA media controllers
Other integrated ports Three USB; two HMC; two SPCN Nine USB; four HMC; four SPCN
GX slots (12X) Two Eight
Expansion features (optional—operating system dependencies)
I/O expansion Up to 4 PCIe 12X I/O drawers
Up to 8 PCI-X DDR 12X I/O drawers		 Up to 16 PCIe 12X I/O drawers
Up to 32 PCI-X DDR 12X I/O drawers
High-bandwidth PCI adapters 6 Gigabit SAS
Other PCI adapters supported SAS, Fibre Channel, Ethernet, SCSI, WAN/Async, USB, Crypto, iSCSI
PowerVM virtualization technologies
 
POWER Hypervisor™ LPAR, Dynamic LPAR; Virtual LAN (Memory to memory inter-partition communication)
PowerVM Standard Edition (optional) Micro-Partitioning with up to 20 micro-partitions per processor; Multiple Shared Processor Pools; Virtual I/O Server; Shared Dedicated Capacity
PowerVM Enterprise Edition (optional) PowerVM Standard Edition plus Live Partition Mobility (LPM)1 and Active Memory Sharing (AMS)2
RAS features Processor Instruction Retry
Alternate Processor Recovery
Selective dynamic firmware updates
Chipkill memory
Memory DRAM sparing
ECC L2 cache, L3 cache
Redundant service processors with automatic failover3
Redundant system clocks with dynamic failover3
Hot-swappable disk bays
Hot-plug/blind-swap PCI slots
Hot-add I/O drawers
Hot-plug power supplies and cooling fans
Dynamic Processor Deallocation
Dynamic deallocation of logical partitions and PCI bus slots
Extended error handling on PCI slots
Redundant power supplies and cooling fans
Active Memory Mirroring
Power System Pool
Capacity on Demand features (optional) Processor and/or Memory CUoD
Elastic Processor and/or Memory CoD
Trial Processor and/or Memory CoD
Utility CoD
Operating systems AIX, IBM i, and Linux for Power4
High availability IBM PowerHA family
Power requirements Operating voltage: 200 V ac to 240 V ac
Power consumption: 1,600 watts maximum per enclosure
System dimensions Power 780 rack drawer building block:
6.9 in. H (4U) × 19.0 in. W × 34.0 in. D (174 mm × 483 mm × 863 mm)
weight 155 lb (70.3 kg)5
Warranty (limited) 24×7, same day response for one year; onsite (varies by country).
Warranty service upgrades and maintenance are available.

1 Live Partition Mobility not supported on IBM i
2 Active Memory Sharing requires AIX 5.3-12 SP5 or later, IBM i 6.1 or later, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 SP4 for Power or later or Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.1 or later
3 Requires two or more enclosures (nodes)
4 See Facts and Features for specific supported operating system levels
5 Weight will vary when disks, adapters and peripherals are installed

PDF icon POD03032USEN.pdf