Test Your PHP App for Free on IBM's New POWER8 Servers

Software vendors and service providers can test their PHP applications on IBM POWER8 servers running a ‘turbo charged’ LAMP stack for free until Dec. 10 under a new IBM promotion.

IBM’s ecosytem development team has created a cloud environment for functional testing to help raise awareness of its partner-based Linux on POWER8 LAMP (Linux + Apache + MySQL + PHP) stack alternative, nicknamed Turbo LAMP. Their partners include Ubuntu supported by Canonical, which offers Linux scale-out performance and rapid provisioning with its JuJu Charms framework; Zend’s PHP Server for enterprise scale and security; and MariaDB with MySQL compatibility.

Turbo LAMP exploits POWER8 architecture with 2x or better performance than comparable x86 servers for data intensive workloads, says Leamon Hall, leader of ecosystem development for Linux on Power at IBM. In addition, Mellanox is providing a 40 GB network fabric that integrates with the full stack to deliver the highest performance cloud infrastructure, though this piece isn’t included in the test environment for this promotion.

“Turbo LAMP is another step in showing our leadership in Linux by bringing key partners together in an innovative stack that is optimized with each other’s software to take advantage of the extreme performance that you get on POWER8,” Hall said.

The Turbo LAMP stack provides a standard open source based LAMP stack to enable PHP applications to just run as-is on IBM’s new POWER8 servers. In addition, each component of the stack has been tuned for optimal performance and integrated with JuJu Charms for rapid cloud provisioning, Hall said.

POWER8 processors, introduced in April as integral to IBM’s first open servers designed for big data, offer eight-way multithreading for four times more threads along with 4x greater memory bandwidth than a commodity x86 processor, according to the company. By combining the Power8 technology with the Turbo LAMP stack, IBM aims to offer a supported hardware and software solution that can be installed on-premise for private clouds or accessed via a public cloud.

“All of a sudden you can do more with less. So for a private cloud or a cloud service provider that means a more cost-effective infrastructure longer term,” Hall said. “And it means an extensible architecture that can grow much larger without having to add a lot of hardware along the way.”

The Linux on Power Turbo LAMP App-a-Thon is a great opportunity for developers looking for a solution to help bump up their proof of technology application to one that meets enterprise-grade performance and security criteria, Hall said. E-commerce or content-based applications, in particular, are likely to reap the benefits of the Turbo LAMP/ Power8 combination, as well as applications that are data-intensive.

“Demanding apps that might require 20 cores of processors can benefit from 160 threads vs. only 40 threads on an x86 based LAMP server. Especially for a server that needs to support applications with large numbers of users and high volume data transfer rates between MariaDB and Zend (which typically happens in e-commerce), the Turbo LAMP stack would be very well-suited for this,” Hall said.

Anyone who registers for the App-a-Thon will have remote access to test their apps on IBM’s hardware. And IBM is offering other incentives for testing, including a two-week optimization and sizing guide with IBM Innovation Center on Turbo LAMP full stack with Mellanox 40Gb network fabric and a customized “go to market” and channel assessment with IBM Power Sales.

To see the full details and to register visit https://ibm.biz/tlamp-start