Maybe it's just a cat thing.

IBM on Wednesday announced its Informix Dynamic Server (IDS) will support the Mac OS X 10.5 operating system, a.k.a. 'Leopard' beginning with the mid-year release of the latest version of IDS 11, code-named Cheetah 2.

Developers can now download a beta version of IDS Developer Edition from the IBM Web site but customers looking for a production version of Cheetah 2 will have to wait for a few more months, Bernie Spang, director of IBM data servers, told InternetNews.com.

"There are many Mac application developers in education and government who are looking for high performance, high reliability and scalability for database management software," Spang said. "It's important for them that it not complicate their experience. Mac is known for its ease of use. And ease of management really means no management at all."

IBM chose this week's Macworld Expo as the venue for the announcement, hoping to spread the word to the thousands of Mac developers in attendance who, until now, had been excluded from the IDS party.

Cheetah 2 will extend online transaction processing (OLTP) (define) data serving capabilities to the Mac platform in addition to its current support of Linux, Unix and Windows operating systems. IBM said IDS provides continuous availability and disaster recovery features, including support for multiple secondary servers, and claims 99.9 percent availability.

Spang said the timing of the announcement was coincidental and reflects both IBM's commitment to the growing IDS platform and the work that Apple's done in the past year to revamp its flagship operating system software.

"Maybe it's the cat names," he joked. "Somebody must have decided that we should be hunting the prey together."

IBM rolled out IDS 11 in June, incorporating the continuous data-availability and disaster recovery technology from its mainframe machines to help customers better manage their server clusters regardless of the distance between backup datacenters.

Spang added that the Cheetah 2 release, following the IDS 10 and initial IDS 11 offerings, demonstrate both IBM's commitment to the platform and its independence from its DB2 line.

"The message we've been on and clearly demonstrating for several years is that Informix product line continues to be a strategic product line," he said. "We've been consistent in delivering capabilities in IDS that we've drawn from DB2 and capabilities from DB2 that we've drawn from IDS."