IBM to Supersize its Mainframe Power

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IBM plans to announce a significant strategic move in its server and storage systems group next Tuesday, internetnews.com has learned.

The company has been hush hush about the news, which has been the subject
of speculation and rumors for the past month since IBM began sending out
invites to the New York City event.

But one analyst says IBM is set to unveil a new zSeries 990 mainframe, boasting 30 to 40 percent more power at the processor level than the original system, dubbed T-Rex.

“It will be more than that in terms of the overall system capacity because they’re going to have a lot more engines [or CPUs] available,” Gartner analyst Mike Chuba told internetnews.com. “Right now it tops out at 32. They’re going to go past 32 so the overall system capacity will be more than 30 to 40 percent.”

Chuba said it’s a piece of the puzzle that explains why IBM’s second-quarter mainframe results dipped 24 percent year-over-year.

“A lot of their large users knew it was in the pipeline and held off [buying] to wait for the latest product,” Chuba said.

IBM has been trying to find new ways to boost its mainframe revenues, recently increasing the university participants in its academic booster program for its Big Iron offering.

IBM will announce its news at the W Hotel in Manhattan, returning to the
site of its Power Everywhere chip architecture play in
March 2004.

Top executives from the company, including Executive Vice President Nicholas
Donofrio, Senior Vice President Bill Zeitler, zSeries General Manager Erich Clementi, Linux GM Jim
Stallings, Tivoli GM Al Zollar and xSeries GM Susan Whitney, are expected to
participate.

Chuba said he expected additional announcements. One analyst with knowledge of the event was vague.

“There are a number of things being announced that week; some of it will
likely be storage related,” said the analyst, who asked not to be named.

In other news, IBM has folded its forward-looking computing unit, internally known as Quasar, into its systems and technology
group, according to the Think Secret Web site.

The idea is that the company is getting ready to advance its Project ECLipz, which
includes a converged server based on the Armonk, N.Y., company’s Power6 chip
architecture. The acronym suggests a merger of the company’s i, p and z
series systems.

Power has not yet been applied to the zSeries mainframe, so the
indication that IBM is ready to announce it on the mainframe is
significant, said Summit Strategies analyst Joe Clabby.

The idea is that Power6 will light the way for a single chip architecture
to represent the best capabilities from Big Blue’s disparate server lines.

According to a research note by The 451 analyst William Fellows, ECLipz will
be able to harness the power of a 32-way system in a smaller form factor.

“ECLipz will provide the vertical integration of nodes or blades using
InfiniBand or gigabit Ethernet, as well as horizontal integration between
racks and nodes,” Fellows wrote in a research note.

The event may only be a glimpse of the future: Power6 isn’t scheduled to
appear until 2006 or 2007. In the meantime, IBM just launched
its first dual-core Power chip, the 970MP.

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