To provide for the new needs of clients looking to handle the massive amounts of data attached to social media and analytics, IBM is rolling out new POWER8 servers.  According to the company, these are 50x faster than the x-86 based servers, the low-end variant of their product, sold just this January to Lenovo Group Ltd, a Chinese PC manufacturer.

According to Charles King, an analyst at Californian Pund-IT “For IBM customers in particular the POWER8 represents a generational jump forward so far as overall performance and system capacity goes.  …. POWER8 should help IBM move forward in this very cloud-centric, analytic path that it has been working on.”

The POWER8 is the product of several years of research and innovation and $2.4 billion invested.  The aim is to tackle large scale computing and manage enormous amounts of data.  Some, including Jeffries analyst Peter Misek, see this as a further move towards focusing on the high end server market, a product which not every company needs.  IBM does not seem to share this scepticism and has released the data specifications of POWER8 to the openPOWER foundation to enable the developer community to create new system designs based on the server.

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(Image Credit:  Bob Mical)