The IBM 7040 Model 681 Central Electronics Complex pSeries 690 provides outstanding 64-bit compute performance for the UNIX environment. It features SOI (silicon on insulator) copper chip technology, mainframe inspired logical partitioning (LPAR) and self-managing capabilities.

The IBM p690 will benefit customers in all segments. Traditional enterprise customers need more powerful systems as they integrate and extend their mission-critical operations, such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Customer Relationship Management (CRM), and Supply Chain Management (SCM) to include e-business and e-commerce, the subset of e-business concerned with buying and selling using the Internet. It is designed to provide the availability, reliability, scalability, and performance that address key unmet customer needs:

• Compete effectively by increasing business efficiency
• Streamline decision management by integrating business and management processes
• Improve customer service by extending business and management processes to include customers and business partners

This UNIX High-end mainframe-inspired super server is ideal for large enterprises with heavy duty commercial workloads that require highly reliable continuous operation as well as for scientific and technical workloads that require significant number crunching and near linear scalability. It has the flexibility to perform as a high-end SMP with LPAR and HACMP high availability software.

The benefits of the IBM p690 vary by usage. For server consolidation, reducing the complexity of managing systems, reducing the physical footprint, increasing flexibility, improving availability, increasing security, and decreasing overhead costs can be experienced by utilizing the system capabilities.

For the e-Infrastructure environments, quality of service to customers is enhanced, level of system security is increased, the time to deploy is decreased, the infrastructure is more easily managed, performance is maximized, and new technologies are integrated and utilized.

The p690 also provides an excellent approach to a wide range of high performance computing applications because of high performance characteristics, quality operating environment, wide range of configurations, and ability to be clustered as workload demands increase. pSeries 690 systems configured with 4-way, HPC option processor Multi-Chip Modules (MCM features #5240 and #5250) may be especially attractive to customers in the high performance computing environment. This configuration provides twice the amount of Level 2 and Level 3 cache, as well as additional memory bandwidth, per processor when compared to p690 systems configured with 8-way processor MCMs. The additional cache and memory bandwidth provided by this configuration may provide significantly higher performance per processor for certain engineering and technical environment applications.

The fast engine and increased performance, the ability to tackle larger problems, leadership technology and skill management provide the benefits in a high-performance computing environment.

In addition, for core applications, the p690 enables additional growth for database engines, high application availability, two-tier approaches using LPAR, and increased BI enablement due to performance and capacity improvements.