IBM has announced it's new range of servers based on its POWER5 CPU. All the servers run Linux (RH or SLES) and have some pretty cool abilities.

For example :
- With the current POWER4 servers, you can have Logical Partitions, effectively taking a server and allocating CPUs, memory, disk and adapters to different partitions which look and behave like separate computers.
- With POWER5, you can have up to 10 partitions per CPU, meaning that a 2-CPU server can have up to 20 Linux (or AIX or OS/400) partitions running, and larger servers can have over 100.
- You can share ethernet adapters between partitions, so multiple partitions can share the same ethernet adapter (but it appears as a separate adapter to each partition, with its own IP addresses etc.).
- You can carve up disks and share them between partitions. For example, if you have two 70GB disks in the server, you can carve them up to look like 14 10GB disks, which different partitions can boot from.
- You can dynamically move resources (e.g. CPU, memory, adapters) between partitions.
- You can set up a virtual ethernet switch in the firmware of the server (a bit like the BIOS on a PC). This ethernet switch is IEEE compliant and supports VLANs and all that sort of thing.
- Max RAM is 32GB at for the 1-2 CPU box, up to 1TB of RAM at the top end (though the top server currently announced has a miserly maximum of 512GB RAM )

Pretty cool stuff - I'm looking forward to getting my hands on some. More information at http://www-1.ibm.com/servers/eserver/pseries/ for the IBM stuff and http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/07...ower5_rollout/ for the story in The Register.