The Power 720 Express server is a 1-socket server supporting 4-core, 6-core or 8-core POWER7 processor modules in a flexible rack-optimised or tower form factor. The leading-edge RAS and diagnostic capabilities make it an ideal distributed application, small consolidation server, or a complete integrated business system utilizing the IBM i operating system. The Power 720 Express is designed to deliver outstanding business value to small and midsized businesses while meeting the needs of mission-critical applications. This highly flexible, available and easy-to-manage server can enable you to spend more time running your business utilizing a proven solution from thousands of ISVs that support the AIX, IBM i and Linux operating systems.

Overview

Highlights

  • Reliable, secure distributed application server or consolidation server for UNIX, IBM i and Linux workloads
  • IBM i delivers a highly scalable and virus-resistant architecture with a stable database and middleware foundation for efficiently deploying business processing applications

Everyone knows what “performance” meant for IT in the past. Built on the foundation of POWER7® processor technology, our Power Systems Express servers continue to excel and extend industry leadership in the traditional benchmarks of performance.

But, today, the IT landscape is evolving rapidly. And, as processes become more interrelated and complex, IT is being called upon to solve challenging new problems—and implement new IT projects, delivering them with both higher service levels and in a more cost effective manner.

The emerging measures of IT performance today are around agility and the ability to help the business capitalize on new opportunities. 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 and find the lowest cost solutions possible.

Like many companies, you may be facing the challenge of an overly complex IT environment. As your business grows, your computing needs increase. Implementing and managing new applications can mean adding more servers, which increases spending and staffing requirements. Now more than ever, you need a system that can help you become more responsive to your customers, improve productivity, operate without interruption and secure your data and systems—all without making large upfront investments in time, skills or money. You need a business system that is there when you need it and grows with your business.

As a distributed application server, the IBM Power® 720 Express is designed with capabilities to deliver leading-edge application availability and enable more work to be processed with less operational disruption for branch office and in-store applications. As a consolidation server, PowerVM™ Editions provide the flexibility to use leading-edge AIX®, IBM i, Linux for Power and x86 Linux applications and offer comprehensive virtualization technologies designed to aggregate and manage resources while helping to simplify and optimize your IT infrastructure and deliver one of the most cost-efficient solutions for UNIX, IBM i and Linux deployments.

The Power 720 Express with IBM i provides a technology foundation with proven reliability and security for the small or midsized company seeking a complete, integrated business system to avoid increased spending and staffing requirements while becoming more responsive to your customers, improving productivity and keeping data secure. IBM i integrates features to simplify your IT environment and delivers a complete, cost-effective business system that can grow with a business. And the Power 720 delivers the performance and capacity to run new and existing core business applications on a single server, to greatly integrate and simplify your IT environment.

Come see why so many clients are moving to IBM Power Systems™. Reliable and secure, the Power 720 Express is a one-socket server that supports up to eight POWER7® cores in a flexible 4U rack-optimized or tower form factor. The performance, availability, and flexibility of the Power 720 can enable you to spend more time running your business utilizing a proven solution from thousands of ISVs that support the AIX, IBM i and Linux operating systems.

 

Feature Benefits
Leadership 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 licenses
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
PowerVM Virtualization
  • Easily add workloads as your business grows
  • Utilize the full capability of the system to reduce infrastructure costs by consolidating workloads running the AIX, IBM i or Linux operating
  • Provides ability to handle unexpected workload peaks by sharing resources
Intelligent Threads
  • Optimize performance by selecting the suitable threading mode for your application
Active Memory Expansion
  • Enables more work to be done with existing server resources
Flexibility and choice of AIX, IBM i and Linux operating systems
  • Choose the operating environment that best suits your application and business needs
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

 

Specification
Configuration options
POWER7 processor modules—one per processor card 4-core 3.0 GHz or
6-core 3.0 GHz or
8-core 3.0 GHz
Sockets 1
Level 2 (L2) cache 256 KB per core
Level 3 (L3) cache 4 MB per core
Memory 4 GB to 256 GB1 of RDIMM DDR3
Active Memory Expansion
Solid-state Drives (SSD) Up to eight SFF drives or
Disk drives Up to eight SFF SAS drives
Disk capacity Up to 4.8 TB
Media bays Slimline for DVD-RAM
Half height for tape drive or removable disk
I/O Model 8202-E4B Model 8202-E4C
PCI Adapter slots Four PCI Express 8x plus optional four PCI Express Generation 2 Low Profile Five PCI Express 8x Generation 2 plus optional four PCI Express Generation 2 low profile
Standard Ethernet Four virtual Ethernet 10/100/1000 Mbps ports (or)
Two virtual 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports		 Two Ethernet 10/100/1000 Mbps ports
Integrated SAS controller One controller for SAS DASD/SSD and DVD-RAM
Optional protected 175 MB cache with 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 (optional) 8 Gigabit Fibre Channel
10 Gigabit Ethernet
10 Gigabit Fibre Channel over Ethernet
Dual port Quad Data Rate IB		 4-port 8 Gb Fibre Channel
10 Gigabit Ethernet
10 Gigabit Fibre Channel over Ethernet
Dual Port Quad Data Rate IB
I/O expansion (optional) Up to 2 PCIe 12X I/O drawers – 20 PCIe slots
Up to 4 PCI-X DDR 12X I/O drawers – 24 PCIx slots
Up to 380 SFF disk slots
Other integrated ports Three USB, two HMC, two system ports, two SPCN
GX slots (12X) One GX++2
Other PCI adapters supported include SAS, SCSI, WAN/Async, USB, Crypto, iSCSI
PowerVM technologies
POWER® Hypervisor™ LPAR, Dynamic LPAR, Virtual LAN (memory-to-memory interpartition communication)
PowerVM Express Edition (optional) Up to three partitions on the server; virtualized disk and optical devices (VIOS); Integrated Virtualization 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 (LPM) and Active Memory Sharing (AMS)
RAS features 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 IBM PowerHA™ family
Power requirements 100 V to 240 V ac, single phase
System dimensions Tower: 21.3 in. H × 7.2 - 12.9 in. W × 27.0 in. D (541 mm × 183 - 328.5 mm × 688 mm); weight: 106 lbs (48.2 kg)4
Rack Drawer: 6.9 in. H × 17.3 in. W × 24.0 in. D (173 mm × 440 mm × 610 mm); weight: 82 lbs (37.3 kg)4
Warranty (limited) 3 year Limited Warranty, on site for selected components; CRU (customer-replaceable unit) for all other units (varies by country), Next Business Day 9×5 (excluding holidays), warranty service upgrades and maintenance are available

1 8/128 GB min/max memory for Power 720 Model 8202-E4B
2 GX++ slot shares space with and replaces one PCI Express 8x slot. Available configuration options are dependent on the number of processor cores and other factors. Contact IBM or your IBM Business Partner for specific configuration restrictions.
3 See facts and features document for detailed OS level support.
4 Weight will vary when disks, adapters and peripherals are added.