System iNetwork

October 13, 2008

The 570 Over New 560, Upgrades, and More Announcement Nuggets

Following last week's official Power Systems announcements led by Scott Handy, vice president of worldwide marketing and strategy for IBM Power Systems, I spoke with Ian Jarman, manager of Power Systems software, who filled in a few of the blanks and revealed a couple of new i-focused nuggets.

IBM created a whole new Power System--the Power 560--which fits between the Power 520 and 570. The Power 560 features 4-, 8-, and 16-core configurations running 3.6 GHz POWER6 processors, and IBM says it's designed to help businesses consolidate multiple UNIX, i, or x86 workloads into fewer footprints. The Power 560 also lets customers add capacity with modular building blocks.

"The 560 16-core . . . obviously that gives you modularity in a midrange Express Server, but as it turns out, we think most of our mid- and larger-size clients are still going to be focused on the 570, which extends up to a 32-core system," Jarman says.

"It has greater scalability, it has capacity on demand, it has resiliency features like hot node add and repair, and these are the kind features that are extremely popular among our larger users, given that they typically have multiple partitions, multiple workloads," he adds.

Oh, and although the new Power 560 (and JS12 blade) requires IBM i 6.1, the new 520, 550, and 570s can work with V5R4 or IBM i 6.1. Pricing for each Power System is consistent with previous generations of hardware, Jarman says. Interestingly, although Handy said Power System pricing details would be available online on ibm.com/power, he was partially mistaken. The AIX and Linux version show pricing details, but most of the i Editions do not.

Existing 550 owners can take advantage of the bigger systems without leaping to a 560.

"If you have a POWER6 550 today, you will be able to upgrade to the 6- or 8-core Power 550," Jarman says. "So in this structure you can go from 2 cores to 4 cores to 6 cores to 8 cores, and if you've already bought a POWER6 550, you'll be protected for upgrades through the various cores, up to 8 cores. The new options in terms of memory and disk are consistent with what we've previously announced."

On the software front, the IBM Systems Director platform management solution is starting to gel. "This is really exciting for i clients, for people who have been following Systems Director. The introduction of Systems Director 6.1, which integrates with Systems Director Navigator for i, is a new foundation for platform management across IBM systems, everything from the BladeCenter and System x, through Power Systems to the mainframe," Jarman says.

"It's particularly important for people who are running x86 servers, blades, and Power Systems running i, and all of this can be managed from a platform level with Systems Director. The specific operations for the i environment are done through Systems Director Navigator, which we introduced with 6.1. So that is fully integrated, and it has the same web-based interface and links up to the platform management layer of Systems Director, which then links itself up to the service management layer of Tivoli for enterprise clients," he explains.

Although this wasn't announced during last week's official conference call, Jarman notes that DB2 Web Query picked up an update, too--IBM added Report Broker, which is a report generator for batch reporting. It lets customers create reports and automatically distribute them via email. Plus, there's a software development kit for linking Web Query functions with business applications, although IBM expects this to get the most traction via ISVs who use it for their own applications.

In addition, the private beta for the DB2 Storage Engine for MySQL is humming along. MySQL is the open-source DB for open source apps, and although IBM declined to provide a launch date for the DB2 Storage Engine, it's getting much closer to reality. So how does it work?

"The applications write to MySQL, but the data is actually stored in DB2. The advantage of doing this is that the backups and systems management can be done through DB2, and the data in DB2 can be shared with RPG applications. So you get all of the advantages of MySQL with the flexibility and simple management of DB2," Jarman explains. "This capability that's in beta now will eventually be available from MySQL."

Posted by cmaxcer at October 13, 2008 8:53 AM