Capacity Reports Logo  

Performance & Capacity Planning for AIX and Power Systems

IBM Power6 to Power7 Upgrade

The Scope

The scope of this project was to upgrade the existing Power6 p570's to Power7 p770's.

The Challenge

Reduce the overall cost of the hardware and software upgrade.
Allow sufficient headroom to cater for future planned and unplanned growth.
Improve the return on investment and hardware utilisation.

The Initial IBM Proposal

IBM submitted the initial proposal for the new Power7 hardware for 2 new Power7 p770's and a CEC hardware upgrade to the two existing Power6 p570's.

Power7 p770 summary of specifications:
  • Dual Power7 CEC p770.
  • 32 Processors (3.1GHz) - 28 Active / 4 CUOD.
  • 512GB of Memory - 448GB Active / 64GB CUOD.
  • 6x 146GB Internal Disk.
  • 8x 2-Port 8 Gigabit Fibre Channel Adapters.
  • 2x 1-Port 10GB SR Ethernet Adapters.

The Investigation

Utilising the performance and capacity planning graphs produced from all the NMON data the client had collected over the previous 6 months, we started to analyse the workload and utilisation profile of the application running on existing Power6 p570 hardware.
  • CPU Utilisation for day to day running was 12 CPUs.
  • CPU Utilisation for the one off peak data load would be 20 CPUs.
  • Memory Utilisation for the current system was 200GB.
  • IP Network and SAN Network Utilisation was approximately 40% of adapter bandwidth.

Our Proposal

Our initial proposal was to purchase the Power7 p770 with 32 CPUs installed, 16 would be active and 16 for CUOD (future planned growth). Memory would be 512GB installed with 256GB active and 256GB for CUOD. We did propose that during the initial peak data load, the client could (if needed), switch on the CUOD resource using the 'free' one-off 30 day trial.
After several discussions with the client, they decided to purchase the new Power7 p770s with the following specification as they wanted to guareentee that current and immediate future performance would not be impacted. They did not want to activate any CUOD resources, with the exception of possibly using the 30 day trial if required.
  • Dual Power7 CEC p770.
  • 32 Processors (3.1GHz) - 20 Active / 12 CUOD.
  • 512GB of Memory - 320GB Active / 192GB CUOD.
  • 6x 146GB Internal Disk.
  • 8x 2-Port 8 Gigabit Fibre Channel Adapters.
  • 2x 1-Port 10GB SR Ethernet Adapters.

The Savings

Total Cost Savings: AUD 220,000