IBM
“We believe that BladeCenter JS20 brings a proven, industry standard 64-bit processor, POWER4, into the very successful blades domain of Intel or Intel-compatible blades,” said Sageza Group analyst AJ Dennis. “In delivering such a highly managed, highly redundant, highly integrated SMP/Cluster capable, rackable chassis for the HPC community, IBM is setting the mark for Linux/Windows blade clusters today and perhaps the standard for computing component interconnect and integration of the future.” has brought blade servers into the realm of 64-bit
computing with its first blade server based on its PowerPC
architecture.
The eServer BladeCenter JS20 system, unveiled Tuesday, employs the PowerPC architecture, used to power Apple G5s, giving customers an added dimension of choice for thin
form factor computing, which conserves both space and energy in data
centers. Bundling the PowerPC architecture with blades also offers customers
an alternative to using Intel’s Xeon processors both with no additional
costs.
The Armonk, N.Y. company’s new blade product employs the PowerPC 970 chip,
which is derived from the Power4 technology employed in IBM’s eServer
pSeries Linux-based servers; it scales the largest of any blade the company
has offered to date.
The new product is the latest in a division-wide push to provide more
Linux-oriented server options as alternatives to Unix machines for customers
in the interest of promoting the idea of choice against the dreaded tag of
vendor lock-in, a label which IBM has thrown at rival Sun Microsystems
on occasion. The new product also contributes to a blade
server market research firm IDC expects to account for more than one quarter
of the total server market by 2007.
The JS20 is geared for customers in financial services and research and life
sciences, said Brian Connors, vice president of Linux on Power, whose
position was created to expand the scalability of Linux across the company’s
product lines and bolster IBM’s presence for the popular open-source
operating system throughout the industry.
Connors said the news of the Power-based blades is significant because IBM
now offers blade servers powered by differing processors — PowerPC and
Xeon — that can run differing operating systems all while sharing the same
chassis at the same time, making data center manageability easier.
“This moves Power architecture to price points typically held by IA-32 class
products,” Connors told internetnews.com. “And we see this as the
equivalent of Intel’s 32-bit class architecture with the robustness of the
Power technology to push Linux further into the enterprise.”
“This is about increasing customer choice in a very heterogeneous world but
we also want scale these things out massively to optimize performance
cluster models,” Connors continued, pointing to the momentum of Linux to the
recent news of the company’s Blue Gene supercomputer progress.
Connors said a clear migration from Unix to Linux in the low-end server
market is hurting companies like Sun and HP, while IBM, who
generally offers more choices than its competitors, stand to benefit from
being able to run multiple operating systems due to the logical partitioning
capabilities of its Unix-based pSeries machines, as well as it ability to
run Linux “directly on the metal.”
It is this flexibility, the will keep Linux-hungry customers from pushing
the company’s pSeries servers to the side, Connors said. Customers
transitioning to Linux, he said, will be able to run AIX while consolidating
workloads for Linux.
“We want to drive Linux to be as robust as the Unix market over time,”
Connors said.
Developed with the company’s now standard BladeCenter chassis, the JS20 will
have Power processor-based, 2 way symmetric multiprocessing (SMP), a base
memory of 512MB, as well as systems management features for easy
integration and low operational costs. JS20 supports both SuSE Linux and
Turbolinux.
The JS20 is also now the least expensive Power processor-based server
available on the market, featuring a starting price of $2,699, which is the
same as the Xeon-based BladeCenter products.
Looking forward, Connors said IBM plans to create additional BladeCenter
options that will lead to further consolidation in the big server industry,
as the company continues to fill out its product line to handle various
types of workloads.
IBM Tuesday also unveiled the eServer BladeCenter for Bioinformatics, a
solution designed to deliver high-throughput computing and application
performance in life science research environments, where workload balancing
is often difficult. Applications for sequence analysis, such as BLAST,
FASTA, and HMMER, have been ported to and run on the JS20.
Big Blue Boasts Power PC Blades
