Tony, When are you going to pull a Ralph on us and reverse yourself concerning Intel chips replacing some mainframes (S390)?
zdnet.com
IBM has big (iron) plans for Netfinity
By Lisa DiCarlo and Carmen Nobel, PC Week Online August 17, 1998
IBM is putting the finishing touches on a long-term road map that will migrate mainframe technologies such as encryption, clustering and scalability to its Netfinity servers.
The plan will begin to unfold Sept. 23, when the company releases three new Netfinity servers that include a 56-bit CryptoCard for encryption, 200M bps ESCON (Enterprise Systems Connection) adapters and the company's first IBM-branded Fibre Channel storage product, said sources familiar with the company's plans.
At that time, IBM will announce a Windows NT-based SP2 switch that
will eventually enable up to 1,000 nodes to be connected to a Netfinity server along with plans to migrate its Parallel Sysplex clustering technology to the Netfinity line.
"We really want to get to the point where clustering gives you the performance boost that you see" in mainframes, said Joe Tier, director of NT technical operations at Digex Inc., in Beltsville, Md., a Web site management company. "It's a great idea for NT, but so far it's not mature."
The new Netfinity servers will come with up to four Intel Corp. Pentium II Xeon processors, sources said, while the ESCON adapters will provide a high-speed channel connection between a Netfinity application server and a data server, such as a mainframe.
The Fibre Channel subsystem is being co-developed by Symbiosis Inc.,
sources said.
IBM's SP2 switch is currently available for RS/6000 servers. The NT
version will enable up to 1,000 nodes to be attached to a Netfinity server, more than twice the number currently supported by Netfinity.
The company's migration of its Parallel Sysplex clustering technology, a hallmark feature of IBM's S/390 mainframe, to the Netfinity line will enable many computers to act as a single system. It will also give Netfinity more robust load-balancing and data-sharing capabilities.
SP2 and Parallel Sysplex technologies may be available for Netfinity servers as early as next year.
Parallel Sysplex capabilities alone would not cause Digex's Tier to abandon his Compaq Computer Corp. servers. But it could prompt the company to add Netfinity servers to its stable of 450 NT servers, he
added.
IBM is trying to make its clustering and other technologies more
standards-based. The company has held discussions with Microsoft Corp.
and Intel about licensing its intellectual property and building the
functionality into future versions of NT and Intel processors.
"We are willing to discuss licensing our [intellectual property] in clustering and scalability to Intel and Microsoft," said Bob Dies, general manager of network and personal computing at IBM.
Dies declined to provide details on the status of the discussions, but other sources at IBM characterized Intel and Microsoft as "receptive" to the idea.
Officials from both Microsoft and Intel declined to comment.
Analysts said a three-way partnership makes sense.
"The only reason that [Microsoft] would turn down [such an pportunity]
is if they are developing something else themselves or there is another partnership," said Jerry Sheridan, an analyst at Dataquest Inc., in San Jose, Calif.
There's the rub.
Intel bought Corollary Inc. last year for its symmetric multiprocessing expertise.
Microsoft has been working with Digital Equipment Corp. (now owned by
Compaq) for two years to extend NT's capabilities. It also has been
working with Compaq's Tandem Computers Inc. subsidiary to support
Tandem's ServerNet clustering APIs in Microsoft's Cluster Server,
code-named Wolfpack (see story, above).
As Wintel-based servers gain credibility in the enterprise, IBM's PC
server division will lean more on technologies born out of its big-iron divisions for differentiation.
For example, when Intel's Merced processor begins shipping in mid-2000, IBM will release servers with custom chip sets based on copper interconnects, sources said. Copper-based interconnects break memory-capacity barriers and improve performance over today's aluminum interconnects.
Over the past several months, IBM has reassigned hundreds of engineers
from its RS/6000 and S/390 teams to Netfinity.
IBM isn't the only server manufacturer looking to bring high-end features to NT boxes. Hewlett-Packard Co., for instance, has assigned some members of its engineering team that designed its mainframe and Unix clustering software to work with Microsoft on the next version of Wolfpack, said officials of the Palo Alto, Calif., company.
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