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IBM To Update Unix Servers

Posted by Hemos on from the power-the-machine dept.

An anonymous reader writes "IBM is about to announce a major update its pSeries Unix servers, according to a story on IT Week's site. The story quotes an IBM source, who said the new servers will use IBM's Power5+ chip."

4 of 22 comments (clear)

  1. IBM Out in Front Further? by eldavojohn · · Score: 4, Interesting
    I don't work with Unix servers, but I've always heard that entry servers using the Power4 processors were the best. From The Unix Guardian:
    As I said when I went over the high-end and the entry Unix server markets earlier this year, without any doubt, IBM has been an increasingly dominant factor in the Unix server business, across all form factors and SMP scalability, since the Power4 processors debuted four years ago. IBM is, in fact, arguably the main reason that the Unix server business has seen any growth at all.
    Now, as the table with that article shows, the 2005 pSeries kills the competition in their workload tests. I'm curious though about other server solutions (large or small scale) that Slashdot users may work with or know about. What about Unisys or Hewlett Packard scalable multiprocessor (SMP) solutions? Has anyone used Unix on these? Is it not recommended because of the chipsets or the way the processors are built?
    --
    My work here is dung.
    1. Re:IBM Out in Front Further? by tweek · · Score: 2, Informative

      Having worked with Power5 systems since they came out, I can attest to the system. The last part that IBM has missing, which I was informed they were working on, is hot-swap cpu. I know Sun has had this for a while.

      IBM has positioned themselves very well by making sure that linux runs on both the pSeries hardware AND the zSeries in addition to the xSeries (Intel line). There is an offical support policy for linux on Power.

      I know Sun just added that to the Sparc line but I'm not sure where HP stands. Is Linux a supported config on the Superdome line?

      The only other company really left is SGI and we all know how that's going.

      --
      "Fighting the underpants gnomes since 1998!" "Bruce Schneier knows the state of schroedinger's cat"
  2. IBM Page Already Updated? by Bad+to+the+Ben · · Score: 2, Interesting
    IBM Page on p5 Systems. Seems that the page is already up with the new info. Note the stats regarding the Power 5 chips:
    POWER5 systems running Linux have beaten the best-of-breed performers in SPECweb99 by 27%, SPECsfs by 158%, and NetBench® by 55% proving the power of Linux on POWER systems. Best of all, a 4-way System p5 550 running DB2® has established leadership TPC-C benchmarks versus other Linux platforms.

    I'd like more info about the "best of the breed" part. If you click on the Performance heading on the above page you can find a PDF to read about the tests, but as in a lot of these cases it's pretty cryptic. I'd love to see a comparison between the newest Opterons and Power 5.

    It's nice to have a solid competitor to x86 though, especially seems how SPARC seems to be losing momentum with Sun using AMD in it's new X series.
    1. Re:IBM Page Already Updated? by twiddlingbits · · Score: 2, Informative

      Give Sun a call. Last time I looked they had like 5 systems using Opeterons, single core, dual core and single/dual CPU. Very good prices as well.