IBM's DB2 on NEC's AzuzA: More Than Meets the Eye?

Timothy Prickett Morgan

Japanese computer maker NEC this week announced its partnership with IBM to certify Big Blue's X86 variant of the DB2 database for Windows and Linux on NEC's Itanium-based, high-end "AzuzA" Express5800 servers. The certification is a testament that IBM's Software Group will chase down money wherever it can find it. The Software Group is also, according to NEC officials, using AzuzA as the platform to build and test Itanium versions of its own database. But the question is whether IBM and NEC are cooking up something more.

Two years ago, when IBM announced that it would license its "Summit" technology to server makers that wanted to build high-end Xeon and Itanium machines that could scale to eight, 16, and some day to 32 processors, the company was able to initially get NEC and rival Fujitsu to sign up. Neither vendor has said much about the Summit-based machines since that time, but if you poke around in different operating units of NEC, you will discover that the company does sell a machine called the Express5800/180-Rd, which is indeed a Summit server rebranded with the NEC label. But the company has been emphasizing its own next-generation of AzuzA machines, the Express5800/1000 series, which scale from eight to 32 Itanium 2 processors and from 64 GB to 512 Gb of main memory, and run either Windows or Linux. Hewlett-Packard is a longtime Unix partner of NEC, and the AzuzA servers also support the HP-UX variant of Unix.

IBM is already shipping a 32-way xSeries 445 server using 32-bit Xeons, and a 16-way xSeries 455 server using 64-bit Itaniums. The company has said it can scale the Itanium box to 32 processors in a single image, but has not done that. The word on the street is that IBM is going to try to push the Summit architecture up to 64-way processing this year with the third generation of its NUMA-like Summit chipset and the forthcoming 64-bit "Potomac" Xeon processors from Intel. But, depending on how the market swings, IBM and NEC partner to save money on Itanium server engineering. IBM, which wants its own 64-bit Power processors to thrive, has no great love for Itanium. While it would be surprising to see NEC and IBM promote a common X86 enterprise server platform, stranger things have happened.

In any event, Mike Mitsch, director of alliances at NEC Solutions America, had nothing to say about the prospects of IBM reselling AzuzA, but he did laugh when I pointed out that the AzuzA box probably scaled better on IBM's own database software running Windows and Linux on Itanium than it would even with 64-bit memory extensions on the Xeon-based Summit machines of IBM design. "You'll have to draw your own conclusions," he said, laughing.

Mitsch did talk about IBM's use of DB2 on AzuzA as an Itanium reference platform and as a compile engine, as it actually makes new builds of DB2 in its software labs. He also said that IBM, Intel, and NEC are working together to foster and to validate solution stacks on Itanium servers running Windows and Linux. He wouldn't say how much money the three vendors have ponied up for this task, but said it was in the seven-figures range.

The interesting thing about DB2 support on the NEC iron is that it helps to bridge the gap between IBM, NEC, Fujitsu, and Hitachi mainframes (which supported the mainframe variant of DB2) and X86-architecture systems. This may not mean much in the United States or Europe, but back in Japan, where the economy has been struggling for nearly two decades, there is still intense pressure to cut costs. Oracle's market penetration for databases on mainframes was never particularly high, and support for DB2 actually makes NEC's life easier in its own customer base. Such an alliance might also help longtime IBM partner Bull, which, along with NEC, supports the GCOS mainframe environment. Bull has its own line of Itanium machines, called NovaScale, which support Windows, Linux, and GCOS. These Bull machines scale to only eight processors, and they only support GCOS across four of them. Bull is working on a more scalable NovaScale box, and it could end up partnering with NEC to get to it.

Then again, IBM, NEC, and Bull could all go their separate ways. This is what happened to Unisys after it was able to get HP, Compaq (which was a separate company at the time), and Dell to agree to resell its ES7000 line, in mid-2000. They all wandered off in different directions.