But Wait, There's More

IBM Says the Integrated xSeries Server Has Plenty of Life Yet

Last week, I talked to George Gaylord, IBM's product marketing manager for iSeries Integrated xSeries solutions, about the pending announcement of native iSCSI attachment of external xSeries servers to the iSeries platform. He wanted to make triple sure that everyone in the iSeries community understood that just because IBM wanted to use iSCSI to attach xSeries servers to the iSeries did not necessarily mean that the Integrated xSeries Server co-processor was a dead-end product.

Here's the deal. For the Power4-based Regatta line of servers, IBM used a 2 GHz Xeon DP processor as the basis for the IxS card. This is a pretty warm chip, and when IBM moved to smaller enclosures with the i5s, it moved to a 2 GHz Pentium M 755 processor as the main brain in the IxS card. This laptop chip is rated at 21 watts, whereas a Xeon chip is in the range of around 100 watts. The thermal envelope in the i5s is a lot smaller, which also explains why IBM has not created an IxS card for the i5s based on the Opteron processors from AMD. To do so, IBM would have to use an Opteron Extreme Edition chip, which is rated at 35 watts (but includes the memory controller, unlike the Pentium M chip). But these chips are very pricey.

Gaylord says IBM is monitoring what Intel does in the laptop chip space, but is making no guarantees about there being a new IxS card down the road. "We will continue to evaluate the chips that could work on the IxS," he explained. I know that the cores used in the Pentium M are going to be the foundation of future Xeon processors, precisely because the Pentium 4 core at the heart of the Xeons is way too hot. So this presents some interesting possibilities. Gaylord wants i5 customers to know that the existing IxS cards and the IxA adapter cards for external xSeries servers are valid and that customers should not worry about future support. If it makes sense to buy one now, do it. Don't worry too much about what is going on with iSCSI-attached xSeries boxes next year. Even with the iSCSI attachment, IBM still needs to hook into the xSeries boxes that have a service processor (so it can control the xSeries machines remotely). The reason why the IxA is limited--and why iSCSI is a better alternative--is that 1U rack-mounted xSeries servers do not have enough room to fit the special electronics for the other end of the Integrated xSeries Adapter card that allows a High Speed Link I/O connection from an iSeries to reach the xSeries.

if you are worried about performance of the single-core IxS card based on the 2 GHz Pentium M, on some internal benchmarks IBM ran on the card it showed that, because of the extra cache memory IBM threw on the card, the IxS performed on SPEC benchmarks as if it were a 3.2 GHz Xeon DP processor. That's pretty good--especially for 21 watts. "The IxS is extremely simple and i5 customers have been thrilled with the performance of the latest one," says Gaylord.

IBM Offers Deferred Payments to Goose Leasing of New Gear in Q4

Because my alma mater is Penn State, I think of annual computer sales cycles like a football game. The fourth quarter and fourth down are when it usually gets interesting. (For once in about six years, the Nittany Lions are playing decently and have a 6-0 record, having beaten Ohio State 17-10 after Las Vegas said it would be OSU by 3; as I write this, Vegas says it will be Michigan by 3, so I am hoping the Nittany Lions can not only squeak by again, but actually trounce Michigan.) IBM is also in a fourth quarter situation, where it wants to show server growth, and that is why it has taken out its tried-and-true financial deferral deal to help boost iSeries, pSeries, and xSeries server sales.

Specifically, IBM is offering a financing deferral plan that allows iSeries, pSeries, and xSeries servers, TotalStorage storage products, various printers, and Integrated Technology Services with financing between $1,000 and $1 million in gear and/or services and 24-month or 36-month financing. Buyers do not have to make payments or incur interest for 90 days. You can buy in Q4 2005 and push it out into Q1 2006's budget. Products acquired under thus deferral program have to ship before December 31. It applies to new machines as well as upgrades, by the way.

Take Part in Gabriel Consulting Group's Unix Usage Study

We have partnered with Gabriel Consulting Group, an IT consulting firm, to help it find IT people to take part in surveys for the purposes of understanding what the devil is going on out there in data centers these days. Gabriel Consutling's survey is a semi-annual Unix Vendor Preference Survey that explores enterprise customer attitudes towards the big three Unix vendors. Dan Olds, the founder of the company, says his surveys are a bit different than the standard IT analyst's "What's on the CIO's Mind Today?" poll. "The biggest difference is that we want to hear from people who are actually on the data center floor and who are intimately involved with technology," he says. "We're looking for IT shop managers, system architects, system managers, application developers, rather than CIOs. Nothing against CIOs, but they generally don't know the down-and-dirty details of what is actually happening in the data center and the challenge of day-to-day operations." Amen to that, brother.

Gabriel Consulting wants to examine the customer experiences with and perceptions of various system vendors (primarily Unix and X86 servers so far) in order to understand how vendors are, or are not, adding value to customer operations. Many iSeries shops are also users of various Unix platforms, too--which is why IBM is supporting AIX natively on the iSeries with the latest i5 machines--which is why we are helping Olds out with his survey. To make it worth your while, Olds says he will give the first 200 survey participants coming from IT Jungle's publications to take the Unix survey a $10 Amazon.com gift certificate, delivered through email. He adds that you can use an anonymous email account if you wish, but that you should rest assured that you will not receive any spam or sales pitches from Gabriel Consulting and that he promises to never disclose any identifiable data to any third party. You can help out and take the survey by clicking here. Olds has also signed up to be a contributing editor at IT Jungle and to share some of the details of his surveys with our readers. Help him out if you can and, in the long run, what he finds out may help you. Thanks.

New Tape Drives, Tape and Optical Libraries for the i5s

If you have a hankering for some new storage for your iSeries server, IBM has some new products for you.

Last week, Big Blue announced the TS1120 E05 tape drive, which is a variant of the 3592 tape drive it has been selling for some time. This one has a native data transfer rate of 100 MB/sec, which is 2.5 times faster than the 3592 J1A tape drive, and at 500 GB per tape, can house 16 times as much data. The TS1120 E05 has a two-port Fibre Channel attachment to servers and requires OS/400 V5R2 or i5/OS V5R3. It is also supported on AIX 5L 5.1 and higher and the most recent Linuxes from Red Hat and Novell. The tape drive costs $6,000 or $7,500, depending on features; a 4 Gb/sec Fibre Channel switch costs $16,350.

IBM also announced the TS3310 tape library models L5B and E9U, the former being a 5U tape library for LTO 3 drives and the latter being a 9U extension unit for that library so it can hold more drives and tapes. LTO 2 drives are not supported in the library. The L5B library has 30 tape slots of storage, 6 slots of storage near the drives, and up to two LTO 3 drives. The LTO 3 tapes support 400 GB of native capacity (twice that with compression on) and can move uncompressed data at 80 MB/sec. The base L5B unit, which costs $14,000, holds about 12 TB uncompressed, and the E9U expansion unit, which costs $11,000, holds another 36.8 TB uncompressed. These prices do not include the cost of the LTO 3 drives, which cost $12,500 for a SCSI-connected unit and $14,500 for a Fibre Channel-connected unit.

Finally, IBM announced the 3996 Ultra Dense Optical (UDO) library, which it is getting on an OEM basis from Plasmon. The 3996 optical library uses 5.25-inch, 30 GB optical discs, providing capacities of between 960 GB and 5.2 TB; it attaches to the iSeries through a SCSI connection. The base 3996 model 032 has one drive with an option for two and supports 32 discs; it costs $16,713. The 3996 model 080 has two drives (expandable to four) and supports 80 discs; it costs $31,865. The 3996 model 174 has two drives (expandable to four) and holds 174 discs; it costs $69,229.

Going Mobile: IDC Reckons 850 Million Workers to Cut the Cord by 2009

According to research performed by IDC, there were more than 650 million mobile workers in the world at the end of 2004 and by 2009, the mobile worker count will grow by 200 million more. That will mean about a quarter of the worldwide workforce will not be latched to any particular physical location and will be in need of various technologies to keep them in contact with customers, suppliers, and co-workers. IDC says Asia/Pacific (not including Japan) has the highest number of mobile workers, followed by the United States, Western Europe, and Japan.

Blind Swap Cassette Sweepstakes Contest Winners Revealed

Last week, when we went over IBM's October 5 announcements, I told readers I ran across a whosiemawhatsis in the new feature 4813 Integrated xSeries Server co-processor card called a "double wide blind swap cassette." No, it is not two people in a big mobile home, blindfolded, trading music in the era before CDs and after vinyl. And no, no one--including myself--was able to figure it out exactly without calling Big Blue.

But reader Bryan Dietz of Aktion Associates came pretty close, guessing it was some means to put a feature 4812 into an expansion unit. Reader Dave Heffernan of Matco Tools did what I did--went to Google and found a few obscure references to it as well and made a similar guess.

As it turns out, feature 4813 is indeed a feature 4812 IxS card that has a container wrapped around it that keeps the dual-port IxS card in line and from wobbling so it can be easily slipped in and out of the PCI-X slots in the i5 570 or the feature 5790 expansion tower.

The way I see, all three of us get a Prickett Morgan's Finest London Porter. I best get to brewing this weekend, then.