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IBM power on the Indian highway
By siliconindia
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Monday, 17 December 2007, 20:30 IST
Male: The HDFC bank has drastically reduced response time for customer queries on loan applications. There is also a visible decrease in energy requirements, software licensing costs and even the total cost of ownership (TCO) for the bank. Behind all these miracles is the deployment of the new IBM Power6 (P6), the Big Blues latest dual core microprocessor, reported The Times of India.
"As per IDC, close to $10 billion will be spent on data centre energy worldwide in 2007. Power and cooling are complex issues faced by organizations and that spend is expected to grow at eight times the rate of hardware spend. Given that, virtualization and green technologies are the need of the hour for cost conscious Indian companies. And this is where P6 comes in. The P6, at 4.7 GHz, is twice as fast as Power5 (P5), but uses nearly the same amount of electricity as P5 to run and cool, which means customers can use the new processor either to increase their performance by 100percent or lower their power consumption by 50 percent," says Shashi B Mal, Director, systems & technology group, IBM India.
The P6, touted as the world's fastest microprocessor, was first shipped worldwide in June, and has just made its way into Indian enterprises and shelves. In India, the P6 is expected to gain traction amongst small and medium businesses (SMBs) and new entrepreneurs initially. To promote adoption in the SMB space, IBM is working with independent software vendors (ISVs) to provide packaged bundled solutions using P6. "New companies need quick solutions and bundled offerings appear more attractive to them. Plus they have no legacy problems to deal with and can afford to migrate immediately," says Jyothi Satyanathan, VP, IBM India.
Companies like Unilever, ABB, Dabur, Aviva, Metlife, HDFC Bank, ICICI Bank, GMR Infrastructure, Bajaj Group and Union Bank of India have already adopted the P6 in India. Many of these clients have migrated from competing platforms. Satyanathan expects the early adopters of P6 to come from banking, insurance, telecom and high end manufacturing, verticals that traditionally have used Unix systems and have high volume of transactions. "Given that technology ages fast, these guys are open to adopting newer versions much faster than other verticals," says Satyanathan.