http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/44123.wss
ARMONK, NY - 10 Jun 2014: IBM (NYSE: IBM) today began shipping its next generation of Power Systems servers incorporating IBM's POWER8 processor which is available for license and open for development through the OpenPOWER Foundation.
The new POWER8-based Power Systems result from a $2.4 billion, three-plus year development effort and exploit the innovation of hundreds of IBM patents — underscoring IBM's commitment to providing higher-value, open technologies to clients. IBM designed the new servers specifically for a new era of Big Data, allowing organizations to manage staggering data requirements. According to IBM test results, the IBM Power Systems running BLU Acceleration on Power are capable of analyzing data 82 times faster than a comparably configured x86-based system.[1]
At the same time the new Power Systems were introduced in April, IBM also revealed a new collaboration with Linux distributor Canonical, the commercial sponsor of Ubuntu with more than 20 million users worldwide. With general availability today, IBM is offering the latest release of Ubuntu Server, Ubuntu OpenStack, and Canonical's Juju cloud orchestration tools on the new Power Systems servers. Ubuntu on Power Systems provides an easy migration path for existing Linux applications to Power for cloud deployments, delivering Big Data and mobile software applications and boosting the performance of existing applications across cloud platforms. The availability of Ubuntu on Power Systems complements the existing availability of Red Hat and SUSE Linux operating system distributions, already supported on the complete lineup of Power Systems.
