IBM Spruces Up Unix Server Line

IBM Thursday moved to jazz up its Unix server line just a
day after it revealed that its hardware sales for the third quarter were
sluggish.

IBM hopes the improvements in its Unix server line will help bump up
hardware sales, which have been sluggish industry-wide. The Armonk,
N.Y.-based systems vendor’s hardware division revealed some sluggishness in
its third
quarter earnings report Wednesday, as revenues decreased by 1 percent to
$6.7 billion.

The company supplanted a 1.2 GHz Power4+ chip with a speedier a 1.45 GHz
Power4+ processor for its entry-level p615 machines, and also made it
available in “express configuration” formats, making the server easier to
order and deploy than previous company offerings.

The new two-way eServer p615 server comes in the AIX 5L and Linux operating
systems, which are offered as configurations of entry and mid-range pSeries
servers at a lower cost than standard list prices. The 1.45 GHz chip is an
upgrade over the p615’s previous chip, the 1.2 GHz Power4+.

IBM also enhanced its high-end 16-way 670 and 32-way p690 servers, providing
on-demand disaster recovery with pSeries Capacity BackUp Systems. Customers
may access data backup at the click of a button and awaken dormant
processors as part of IBM’s company-wide promise to make its software and
services function as utility computing for administrators seeking more
control and lower maintenance costs. This feature will help customers raise
computing requirements in the face of lost or limited capacity.

The company also introduced the pSeries High Performance Switch (HPS), which
is geared to provide greater bandwidth and lower latency for p655 and p690
servers in the eServer Cluster 1600 environment. A cluster interconnect, HPS
is designed to support bandwidth intensive applications in science and
engineering, such as those for
high-end quantum physics and computational chemistry. HPS supports up to 16
p690 or p655 servers, and will support up to 64 p690 or p655 servers in mid
2004.

Related to the HPS cluster interconnect is the IBM Cluster Systems
Management (CSM) software, which is now available on AIX 5L on pSeries,
Linux on pSeries, and Linux on xSeries. This software helps administrators
install and maintain server clusters, providing remote hardware control,
software updates, resource monitoring tools and automatic problem alerts.

Lastly, Ultra320 SCSI adapters, disk drives, disk backplane support and
external storage subsystems are now available for pSeries machines, which
transfers data using the SCSI over a bus at speeds up to 320
MBps.

Meanwhile, a recent IDC Q2 server report showed that IBM’s Unix servers
gained 5.2 points of worldwide share for the second quarter year to year,
and grew revenue 20.4 percent, encouraging news in Big Blue’s eternal battle
for market share versus rivals HP and Sun Microsystems.

Pricing for the p615 AIX 5L models is as follows: p615 2-way 1.45 GHz Power4+ with two 36.4GB disk drives and 2GB memory is $12,495; p615 2-way 1.45 GHz Power4+ with two 36.4GB disk drives and 4GB of memory is $14,495; and p615 2-way 1.45 GHz Power4+ with two 36.4GB disk drives and 8GB memory is $19,495.

Pricing for the same power p615 AIX 5L servers in “express configurations” is $12,495,
$14,495 and $19,495.