More on the IBM release, from I-Week Daily, 5/4/98
IBM Rolls Out New Mainframe Line
Data-center recentralization may be giving IBM a second wind
in the mainframe market. With its R6 G5 systems, to be
unveiled this week, IBM is targeting customers who want to
consolidate distributed systems with lower-cost, CMOS-based
mainframes.
"This will put IBM back in the picture for the data center,"
says Dennis Vickers, deputy administrator of IT services for
the state of Wisconsin, which plans to create a hot site for
disaster recovery in the fall. IBM, which had been losing
ground to more advanced technology from Hitachi Data Systems
(HDS), will be a contender "for the first time in three or
four years," Vickers says.
The R6 system uses Fibre Channel connectivity to enhance the
availability of IBM's Parallel Sysplex cluster. By using
CMOS processors in the Sysplex architecture, each node of
the cluster provides up to 900 Mips of performance. There
will also be 25 Gbytes of main memory, more flexible
coupling for better Sysplex performance, and a 64-bit
version of the OS/390 operating system by next year. Says
Meta Group analyst Carl Greiner, "IBM is evolving OS/390 to
become the super server within the data center."
The 900-Mips performance of each R6 node is derived from 10
124-Mips processors, factoring in latency. That doubles the
power of the current G4 processor and is in the range of the
most powerful HDS Skyline systems. Say Greiner: "This will
get IBM back into some of the biggest accounts that it lost
to Skyline last year." -- Martin J. Garvey |
