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IBM Adds Mainframe Technology to Unix Servers

Posted on: Friday, 23 July 2004, 06:00 CDT

Power5 line seems to deliver big performance leap

Gregory Martin, integration manager at Royal Caribbean Cruises Ltd., is interested in IBM's PowerS-based servers, including a new Unix server line announced last week. But he wants IBM to produce benchmarks comparing application performance across various IBM systems - not just against competitors' products.

Martin's Miami-based company uses IBM iSeries (formerly the AS/ 400) and pSeries Unix/Linux servers. Benchmarks showing operating system performance across multiple IBM lines would help him make the best server choice for his applications, he said.

"If we don't have a benchmark that compares a pSeries to an iSeries from an OS perspective, then it's hard to compare that to a different technology" from another server vendor, he said.

IBM has no plans to produce internal benchmark comparisons because the iSeries and pSeries hardware architectures are identical, said Jim McGaughan, director of IBM eServer strategy. If a company is interested in comparing the performance of the eServer i5/OS operating system with that of AIX, it's likely to be considering a migration, he said. In that case, IBM would help the user evaluate workload performance on both systems, McGaughan said.

The RISC-based PowerS processor is dual-core, but unlike the Power4 chip, it has simultaneous multithreading capability. That means it can run two instruction streams in real time, or up to four threads in parallel.

A Game of Leapfrog

Server makers are in an endless game of leapfrog with chip performance, say analysts, but the PowerS-based Unix and Linux servers appear to be a significant leap.

IBM is "now pulling in intellectual property from other lines of business," such as logical partitioning from its mainframe group and virtual engine technology from its Tivoli Software group, said Brad Day, an analyst at Forrester Research Inc. in Cambridge, Mass.

ROYAL CARIBBEAN CRUISES wants benchmarks to compare IBM systems to one another.

But while these Unix systems are becoming more mainframelike, they aren't mainframes.

Dave Ennen, IT director at Winnebago Industries Inc. in Forest City, Iowa, uses an IBM zSeries mainframe to run his company's most critical applications. He doesn't see Unix or other servers replacing the mainframe, despite the addition of microprocessor partitioning technology to the Unix servers. "The reason we have the mainframe is we don't ever want it to go down, and anything short of the zSeries doesn't have that kind of dependability," said Ennen.

IBM officials said a wide gap remains between the capabilities of mainframes and those of systems running Unix. For instance, un! like with Linux or Unix systems, the risk of someone cracking into a mainframe system "is almost zero," said Ravi Arimilli, an IBM fellow and chief architect of the IBM Systems Group.

Unix will eventually close the gap with improved security, availability and virtualization, said Arimilli. "When will that crossover happen? I don't think it's anytime soon," he said, estimating that it would be at least a decade.

But the mainframelike processor virtualization capability in eServer PowerS systems will help Benton Harbor, Mich.-based Whirlpool Corp., which just took delivery of a two-way PowerS system.

Virtualizing on the processor level means that Whirlpool can reduce the number of separate network and storagearea networking cards it needs, as well as cut licensing costs on management and monitoring systems that charge on a per-CPU basis, said Robert Gamso, senior principal systems architect at the appliance maker. The Powcr4 hardware required separate adapters; the PowerS does not. It "doesn't always make economic sense" to add cards to achieve virtualization, Gamso said. 48212

Copyright Computerworld Inc. Jul 19, 2004

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