In a move to re-assure existing IBM p570 and p590 customers, IBM earlier this week announced a statement of direction for those customers looking to upgrade to the new POWER7 based systems.

The new POWER7 processors from IBM are due to be released some time next year.

IBM is keen to stress the relatively simple upgrade path for those customers with exisitng POWER6/POWER6+ systems. No fork-lift upgrades will be required allowing for the preservation of existing serial numbers. The upgrade process will involve replacing the "Processor Books" and "System Controllers" of existing systems.

IBM are pushing the use of the Live Partition Mobility technology to assist with the upgrade process. This allows customers to move running logical partitions between physical pSeries servers, for load-balancing and physical maintenanc operations. Unfortunately, it's only of real use if you have two physical pSeries servers that support the technology.

While final dates have yet to be announced for the release of these new systems, IBM is currently not under any pressure to bring this forward as it's main competitors have pushed out rollout dates for their new chips.

You can read the full release from IBM here.