IBM on Monday took a swing at competitor Hewlett-Packard in the "big-iron" application server market with the introduction of a new IBM eServer i890.
Big Blue also released the latest version of it iSeries operating system, IBM OS/400 Version 5 Release 2, which ships in the i890, according to Ian Jarmon, a product marketing manager for iSeries servers at IBM, based in Armonk, NY.
Designed as a mainframe-style alternate to multiple racks of separately-managed application servers, the i890 can be partitioned to isolate each of its 32 processors into an individual application server running either OS/400 or Linux, said Jarmon. IBM will add Windows and its own AIX operating system to the list of OSes that can be partitioned within the 32-way server by 2004, Jarmon said.
The ability to partition multiple server processor nodes into virtual stand-alone servers inside the i890 makes "this system an alternative to server farm solutions," said Jarmon.
Packing IBM's 64-bit Power4 processors running at clock speeds of 1.3GHz, the i890 delivers twice the performance of its predecessor the i840, according to IBM.
News source: InfoWorld - IBM flexes mainframe muscle
