The performance boost attracted the interest of Bill Powell, manager of systems engineering at Le Mars, Iowa-based Wells Dairy Inc., though he's not currently in the market for new servers. "Anything they do to increase the power and enhance the performance of their products, we're going to look at," Powell said.

Wells Dairy in March installed several new IBM p570 servers with standard Power5 CPUs in a cluster to run Oracle databases containing customer contacts and other information.

Consolidation a plus

IBM's two new models are the p5-595, which can scale up to 32 processors with 64 cores, and the p5-590, which has 32 cores. A fully configured high-end system can support up to 254 virtual servers per physical server.

Each processor core can support up to 10 virtual servers, according to IBM.