H ereis a bit of news that should make you IT folks sit up and take notice: An article in eWeek says that IBM will soon offer the 970 Processor, the very one Apple is using in its new line of Power Mac G5 computers, in a series of low cost servers. The new IBM servers will run Linux or AIX and will be configured as a ibladei; rack mount server with thin form factors to allow for many to be mounted in a rack. From the article, IBM Servers to Pair Linux, New PowerPC Chips:
According to sources, the Armonk, N.Y., company plans to take on Sun Microsystems Inc. and Hewlett-Packard Co. with Linux servers priced at the "enterprise entry level," which IBM defines as less than $25,000. Although the current share of Linux servers running on Power processors is marginal, IBM reportedly projects nearly a 20-fold increase -- to almost half-a-million units -- by 2006.
In pursuit of this goal, IBM is poised to introduce two tiers of products: a low-end blade server and an "ultra -low-end" (ULE) rack/deskside model. The initial blade server will be based on the Power PC 970 processor (known internally as the GPUL) , which made its debut this month in Apple Computer Inc.is Power Mac G5 line . A mid-2004 replacement for the blade as well as the ULE products will run on an updated version of that chip, known as the GPUL2.
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The ULE models, which will run Linux and IBMis AIX OS, will ship in 2U two-way and 4U four-way configurations. A base configuration of the 4U is expected to cost less than $3,500, sources said.
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Sources report that IBM internal documents portray Sun and HP as the main targets of the new server effort; these companies offer only Intel-based Linux servers. With the upcoming PowerPC 970- and GPUL2-based ULE products, IBM will stress better performance than Xeon-based servers, 32- and 64-bit compatibility with no migration costs or penalties, and linear price scaling from two-way to four-way systems. Against Itanium and Itanium 2 servers, IBM will promote the ULE as cheaper, less power-hungry, cooler and easier to set up.
You can read the full article at eWeek News.