The Rumor Mill Grinds Away on Upcoming Power5 Announcements

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

There's always a lot of chatter before a big IBM announcement, but rarely does it coalesce into a complete picture of the products that are soon coming to market. Such is the case with the future Power5-based "Squadron" servers and their operating systems: AIX 5L 5.3, OS/400 V5R3, and Linux. While there is a lot of talk about OS/400 V5R3, IBM's proprietary operating system for midrange shops, the noise about AIX and Linux is more muted.

I have heard that IBM will be announcing the new implementation of its WebSphere Web application server on April 20. OS/400 V5R3 is rumored to be coming out before the end of April, and I've heard both April 20 and April 27 as announcement dates. AIX 5.3 could be announced at any time that is convenient for Big Blue, particularly since that the release is not tied to Power5-based iron explicitly. While Squadron machines will undoubtedly require AIX 5.3, rather than prior Unix releases, AIX 5.3 will probably run on any machine with a Power4 or Power4+ processor, and could even be extended backward to machines using S-Star or earlier 64-bit PowerPC processors.

I have also heard from another source that Big Blue could be announcing the hypervisor for the Power5 machines, highlighting this as a separate product that enables the Squadron machines to exist. It would be interesting if the hypervisor is supported on any Power4 or Power4+ server in IBM's line, and that support for concurrent AIX, OS/400, and Linux on any pSeries or iSeries machine is possible with the addition of appropriate I/O features and conversions. If IBM can do this, and does do this, it would be a wonderful way to preserve the significant investments that customers have made in recent Power-based server iron. But knowing IBM, the company will only offer support for this hypervisor on new Squadron boxes--unless it has real problems shipping Power5 chips in volume.

Another rumor I am hearing is that IBM will actually prebundle Linux on the new Squadron boxes. A few weeks ago, I told you that Novell had inked a deal with IBM to allow Big Blue to preload SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 8 on any eServer computer and that Red Hat had signed a deal to allow IBM to sell and distribute Red Hat's Enterprise Linux 3.0 along with (but not yet preloaded on) IBM's Power-based iSeries and pSeries servers and its JS20 Power-based blade servers for the BladeCenters. A few people have told me that at least some of the new Squadron machines will actually come with Linux already on them and the first year of support (what you really pay for when you buy the license) already covered. Neither Novell nor Red Hat would do this for free, but IBM did just pump $50 million into Novell and this may be the payback: IBM gets to put a copy of SuSE on the Power line as part of the Squadrons.