Flex System is an improvement over the BladeCenter blade servers and IBM claims that it can run on Power nodes is an equal and a peer to AIX and Linux running on the same hardware. This means that it can kick the bottom of Windows and Linux running on nodes using Intel's Xeon processors.

Big Blue has launched a two-socket Flex p260+ server node that comes in at the much-desired P05 software tier instead of the P10 tier that is in effect for other Power7 and Power7+ server nodes in the Flex System family. In a press release IBM said it’s new Flex p260+ node, which comes loaded with two dual-core Power7+ chips running at 4 GHz. The Power7+ chip has eight cores.