Escala Power on Demand

Pay for growth only when you need it

Power on Demand is an option that allows you to add resources as they are needed. Pre-installed, but inactive CPU and memory resources can be activated to respond economically to unpredictable workload peaks, additional workloads from other servers or steadily growing workloads.

Power on demand adds no administrative costs, only advantages and higher flexibility.

• No more wasted money on over-sizing: New servers can be tailored to the exact performance predictions
• No more risk of under-sizing: Additional resources are inside the system and can be activated immediately
• Cost saving through small granularity: Activation of only 1 processor or 1GB memory
• Ability to use temporary extra capacity on a trial basis or to support operations in case of exceptional needs
• Higher Reliability: automatic replacement of failing components (build-in spare parts)
• No waiting for shipment: Resources are ‘in-place’ and can be activated immediately when needed
  
• No interruption of services levels during upgrade: Thanks to ESCALA PL’s dynamic partitioning capability (DLPAR)
  
• Power On Demand is available on selected POWER6™ and POWER5™ Escala servers as new orders or as add-ons.

Different types of Power On Demand on selected Escala servers

• Permanent activation of processors or memory in case of:
  • Increasing application response times,
  • System is regularly saturated,
  • new needs : new application
  • deployment, more users…

  Power On Demand features enable you to start small, saving on initial acquisition costs, and then increase your processing capacity without disrupting your application service levels. Power On Demand offers smooth activation with DLPAR and no obligation to purchase inactive resources. Processors can be activated in increments of 1 processor, while memory can be activated in increments of 1 GB.
  

• Temporary activation of resources, ideal solution for:

• Applications with short and unpredictable workloads spikes,
• Seasonal activities
• High availability / disaster recovery installations.
  

Different Power On Demand options allow temporary activation of resources:

The On/Off Power On Demand is used to fully activate a resource temporarily to cover for the demands of business peaks. It is user- managed and available for both processors and memory. The system monitors the amount and duration of the activations.

The Utility Power on Demand, for Escala POWER6™ enterprise servers, is only available for processors. Activations are automatically managed by the server and are measured in processor minute increments.

• Trial, free test drive for 100% processors and 100% memory.
  • Immediately after system installation, in order to test once the performance impact of using the ‘inactive’ resources for the customers individual application,
  • At any chosen time to overcome the first unexpected performance peak or takeover situation.

  The trial-period lasts for the duration of 30 consecutive days and can be activated at any time with the encrypted key delivered with the initial system.
  

• Power Backup : provides an off-site, disaster recovery server using On/Off PoD capabilities.
  • Emergency recovery
  • Failover workloads to backup servers without additional charge
    
    
  The Power Backup offering has a minimum set of active processors that can be used for any workload and a large number of inactive processors that can be activated using On/Off PoD in the event of a disaster.
  A specified number of no-charge On/Off PoD processor days is provided with Power Backup.