IBM to introduce Power4-based blades

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IBM plans to unveil new blade servers in the US on Tuesday, 18 November, based on its Power processor technology.

 

As reported by CRN last month, the eServer BladeCenter JS20 blade servers, based on the same processors as its pSeries servers, fit in the same enclosure as the company's Intel Xeon-based HS20 blade servers, said Jeff Benck, eServer BladeCenter vice president.

 

'With the Power technology, you can have a 64-bit Linux blade sitting next to an Intel blade in the same chassis,' Benck said.

 

The JS20 servers will initially support SuSE and Turbo Linux, said Benck, because the entry-level RISC space is moving to Linux. 'We are seeing many customers on Sun today moving towards Linux,' he said.

 

In mid-2004, the JS20 will support the AIX 5L operating system, Benck said.

 

Volume shipments of the JS20 are expected to start early next year, said Benck. The blade servers cost US$2,699 with two Power4 processors and 512 Mbytes of memory. 'It's a significantly lower price than the pSeries servers today,' he said. 'It will allow us to

penetrate the space served currently by Sun's SPARC blades running Solaris.'

 

Mark Melenovsky, research manager at analyst firm IDC, said his organisation expects the blade server market to be one of the hottest. IDC forecasts that by 2007, about 2.3 million blade servers worth US$6.2 billion will be sold, compared to a forecast of about 200,000 units worth about US$600 million in 2003.

 

 

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