IBM is scheduled to release a new blade server on Tuesday that is the first to run the Power6 processor. Big Blue aims for the new blade to help it grow its market share in the Unix market. Other players in the segment include Itanium on HP-UX systems from HP and servers from Sun Microsystems running Solaris on Sparc processors, including the Niagara chip.
Even though revenue growth in the Unix segment is largely flat, many mission critical applications at large enterprises were originally designed for such systems, and continue to rely on them. The Unix segment today makes up about one third of the overall server market. IBM claims that it has been gaining market share for the past five years. The release of the new Power6 blades will be followed closely by general availability of AIX version 6 on 9 November and the release of Advanced Power Virtualization Enterprise Edition on 16 November.