The news around IBM’s new Power7 Systems is not something that can covered completely in a few blog posts and since the systems promise to make database operations more efficient, cheaper and more risk-free, and give small and mid sized enterprises the opportunity to benefit from JD Edwards, it demands some attention.

So here 10 things every database owner and IT leader should know:

1. New entry POWER7 servers are designed to meet the demands of midsize companies and start at less than $6,500.
2. The high-end system offers better energy efficiency than competitive systems from HP.
3. IBM has achieved the industry's highest ever TPC-C (transaction processing) benchmark using a Power Systems configuration with DB2: hitting 10,366,254 transactions per minute, which beat HP's best result by more than 2.5 times.
4. HP's best result is over twice as expensive per transaction as the IBM result.
5. 285 customers have moved critical business workloads to IBM systems and storage from the competition in the second quarter of 2010, including 86 from HP.
6. More than 2,600 enterprises have switched from the competition to IBM Power Systems since IBM launched its Migration Factory program four years ago.
7. The 256-core IBM Power 795 offers more than five times better energy efficiency compared to servers from HP and boasts IBM's leading-edge EnergyScale technology that varies frequencies depending upon workloads.
8. Consolidating older systems to high-end Power 795 could result in more headroom and yet bring energy reductions of up to 75% for equivalent performance capacity.
9. The new Power Flex (a new environment featuring two or more Power 795 systems, PowerVM Live Partition Mobility and a Flex Capacity Upgrade on Demand) lets enterprises shift running applications from one system to another for system maintenance without downtime.
10. The IBM Smart Analytics System 7700 with POWER7 technology (which features several pretested Power Systems 740 Express server configurations, IBM DB2 powered and InfoSphere Warehouse software and AIX) analyzes data where it resides. This means a shortened cycle time between processing and results no costs in migrating data from one system to another.