SCIENCE

IBM has announced the availability of powerful entry-level systems that provide affordable, easy to manage infrastructure solutions that are optimized for today's emerging workloads, including IT consolidation, real-time analytics, mobile applications, information management and compliance solutions. Based on IBM's industry leading POWER7 processor, the new servers address the demanding requirements that midsize firms have for reliable, secure and flexible infrastructure that can quickly scale to support their growing businesses.

Delivered through IBM Business Partners, the new servers tackle IT complexity by allowing customers to consolidate multiple workloads onto fewer systems, helping to reduce server sprawl, lower IT costs and conserve energy.  The four Express servers – IBM Power 710, 720, 730 and 740 Express – can run up to 30,000 applications and offer the outstanding performance, energy efficiency and other benefits of POWER7 technology to midsize companies.  IBM Express offerings meet stringent development criteria, including reliability, affordability and ease of management to ensure their value to midsize companies

"The new POWER7 Express systems offer growing companies a higher level of business value, services and ROI at affordable prices," says Brett Murphy, Power Brand Manager for Software Information Systems an IBM Business Partner.  "Our customers benefit from the outstanding performance and energy efficiency of a system that's easy to purchase, deploy and manage. And, with a wide range of available applications, we have the solutions needed to address the business challenges of today's growing company."  

Added Stan Staszak, Director of Infrastructure Solutions and Services for Sirius, an IBM Business Partner: "These new systems have the performance, reliability and scalability that our SMB customers need and have come to expect from IBM. Being a Dynamic Infrastructure-certified partner is helping prepare us for many of the new initiatives and workloads customers are focused on, such as cloud and virtualization."

The new servers are among IBM's latest investments in helping midsize businesses find new and affordable ways to apply technology to solve problems and scale for future growth. To support the availability of POWER7 Express servers, IBM Global Financing provides a range of financing options, rates and payment plans to help clients accelerate their migration to IBM Power System and minimize acquisition and operating costs with predictable, affordable monthly financing payments. In July, IBM announced additional co-marketing funding and agency support for eligible IBM Business Partners to quickly launch end-to-end POWER7 business development campaigns to build new pipeline targeted at midsize companies.

"We continue to develop and deploy the powerful technologies that growing businesses need to improve efficiency, innovate and scale for future growth," said Andy Monshaw, general manager, IBM Global Midmarket. "Across IBM, we are committed to helping our business partners and midsize clients find new and affordable solutions to address their business challenges and spark transformation."

With prices starting at under $6,500, these high-density, cost efficient servers minimize complexity and provide the memory capacity, internal storage options, I/O expandability and RAS features needed for demanding workloads in today's high-growth midsize business.  The Power 710 and Power 730 are ideal infrastructure servers in dense 2U, one-two socket rack packages. The rack or tower Power 720 and Power 740 4U models offer additional flexibility with large memory capacities and internal storage for distributed applications, midsize databases and consolidation.

IBM also announced the availability of four new IBM i Solution Editions based on these new POWER7 Express servers.  These solutions are integrated and optimized for rapid ERP deployment, featuring software from SAP, JD Edwards, Lawson and Infor. They are specifically designed to reduce cost, complexity and implementations time for midsize customers.