Tongues Wag About Future eServer p5 Announcements

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

The ink is hardly dry on the promotional materials for the new eServer i5 Model 520 and Model 570 midrange servers IBM launched last week, and people are already talking about the future Power5-based "Squadron" servers that Big Blue has slated for later this year in the former pSeries, soon to be eServer p5, server line. While the two Squadrons announced last week are a good beginning, they do not yet constitute a complete Power5 server product line.

IBM's top brass last week confirmed in several meetings with Guild Companies that the company is indeed trying to get the high-end 64-way Squadron box, presumably to be called the eServer p5 Model 590 when AIX is the primary environment and the pSeries I/O peripherals are configured to it, out the door some time in 2004. This same machine will probably be called the eServer i5 Model 590 when OS/400 is the primary environment and iSeries I/O is configured to the box. (The AS/400 and iSeries use myriad I/O coprocessors to create what is, in essence, an asymmetric multiprocessor, which is different from the RS/6000 and pSeries Unix boxes, which make the central processors handle processing and I/O.) As I suggested might be the case last week, IBM appears to be trying to synch the iSeries and pSeries launch of this big bad box. Shipments of this machine and AIX 5L 5.3, which is required for the Power5 machines, are not expected until late September or early October, but I hear that IBM might launch the machine in late July or early August, to give its sales team some time to crank up the sales cycle so IBM will enter the fourth quarter with a lot of momentum.

IBM is also reportedly working on a four-way server in the p5 and i5 lines, presumably to be called the eServer p5 Model 550 and eServer i5 Model 550, which will slide into the product line between the new Model 520, which can have one or two active Power5 processors, and the Model 570. While the Model 570 is a server that can house either one or two Power5 processors, which means it has from one to four active processor cores, it is more than a simple four-way server. As I explained last week, the Model 570s include sophisticated NUMA-like clustering technologies built right into the system board that will allow two, three, or four Model 570 systems to be glued into a single-system image that spans from one to 16 active processor cores. This is very similar to the xSeries 440 and xSeries 445 "Summit" servers IBM sells using Intel's Xeon and Itanium processors.

The NUMA-style clustering technologies are not cheap, however, and IBM eventually wants to have a workhorse but inexpensive four-way server to fill in the gap between the Model 520 and the Model 570, just like it does in the current xSeries. And because of the way Oracle prices its Workgroup Edition and Enterprise Edition versions of its eponymous databases, IBM needs to have a four-way machine that cannot scale beyond four-way processing, if it hopes to run Oracle Workgroup Edition on a four-way Power5 server. The Model 570 will require customers to buy Oracle Enterprise Edition, which costs a lot more money.

That said, the odds are that IBM will offer an upgrade path from the Model 520 to the Model 550 as well, which gives entry i5 customers somewhere to go when they outgrow their machines. It is unclear when IBM might launch the Model 550, but it could be announced around the same time as the Model 590, or it could come out as the year ends. What IBM sources have told me is that we should expect server announcements on a more or less quarterly basis as IBM rolls out new products. IBM finally understands that people like new technology, even if they don't technically need it. Being new and exciting makes people excited.

Related Article

"pSeries Power5 Servers Might Be Announced This Summer"