New IxS and Other i5-Related Announcements

As promised, IBM announced a new, more compact version of its Integrated xSeries Server (IxS) co-processor for the i5 server line last week. The company also made a number other announcements, including back-casting a new i5 RAID disk controller to the iSeries, offering a new i5 storage chassis, rejiggering software tiers on the Model 520, and adding more upgrade paths into the Model 520 from prior generations of iSeries servers.

The new IxS card is based on a 2 GHz Pentium M processor from Intel. The Pentium M processor, which was designed predominantly for laptops but is also used in blade servers, is physically smaller than prior IxS cards, which means that it can fit inside the i5 Model 520, Model 550, and Model 570 system chassis. The Pentium M chip comes with 2 MB of L2 cache memory, and the IxS card comes with 1 GB of base memory (in two memory slots, expandable to 2 GB total) and has two Gigabit Ethernet LAN ports. It plugs into a PCI-X slot inside the i5 machines. IBM is still selling the existing IxS cards for the iSeries servers, which uses a 2 GHz Xeon processor and plugs into iSeries machines or their expansion units. The Xeon-based IxS cards were supported in expansion chasses that can migrate from iSeries to i5 servers.

The Pentium M-based IxS card supports Windows and Linux, with Linux support being new with this announcement cycle. IBM supports Windows 2000 Server and Advanced Server on the new IxS as well as Windows Server 2003 Web Edition, Standard Edition, and Enterprise Edition. As we previously reported, IBM is supporting Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 ES and AS on the IxS cards; Novell‘s SuSE 8 and SuSE 9 are not available because of issues with the Novell installer program.

The Pentium M-based IxS costs $2,780 and includes 1 GB of main memory. The Xeon-based card costs $1,900, but it costs the same $2,780 with 1 GB of main memory included. The Pentium-M card will be available October 29. Note: there are minor differences between the version of this IxS card for the i5 Model 520, 550, and 570, which means you cannot move them between these machines. Also, this card is not supported on AS/400 and iSeries servers.

IBM also said last week that the feature 2780 PCI-X Ultra4 RAID disk controller, which was initially announced for the eServer i5 machines in August, can now be used on the first-generation iSeries Models 270, 820, 830, and 840, and on the second-generation iSeries Models 800, 810, 825, 870, and 890. The company also said that it had announced a new expansion chassis, feature 5790, which plugs into the backend of an i5 server to provide an additional six full-length, 64-bit PCI-X slots. This chassis is 4Us high but only fills half of the width of a rack, which means you can add 12 PCI-X slots in a full 4U space in a rack. You can attach this PCI-X expansion box to i5 Models 520, 550, and 570. The existing feature 0588 PCI-X expansion chassis has 14 slots but eats 8U of space in the rack. The feature 5790 chassis will be available November 19 and costs a whopping $7,000. You can buy a SAN-capable disk array with a half terabyte of disk capacity for that same price, incidentally. This seems like a high price for a box with six empty slots.

IBM also, thankfully, announced that it is dropping the OS/400 software tier for the two-way Model 520 server from the P30 to the P20 tier. This does two things. First, it makes the software tiers more consistent with the new four-way i5 Model 550 server, which is in the P20 tier as well. A two-way machine should not be in a P30 tier if a four-way machine is in a P20 tier. IBM figured this out, and, to its credit, has fixed it. Guy Paradise, the iSeries marketing manager for this set of announcements, says that IBM will provide a patch to the Model 520 two-ways that have shipped thus far so that they think they are in the P20 tier. No word on whether IBM or software vendors plan to give some money back on tier-based software that customers already bought for these machines, but, obviously, if this has happened, then IBM and the partners owe these customers a partial refund. Paradise also says that IBM is offering more direct upgrade paths from iSeries Models 810, 820, and 830 into the two-way Model 520 now that the tiers make sense. If you wanted to do this before, you had to do a push-pull upgrade because the tiers didn’t match. One last thing: IBM has moved the Model 520 Express Edition machines to a new hardware group, the 9405s. This move was made to allow these machines not to have to fit into the 9406 machine database in IBM’s systems and to allow the business partners that sell these boxes more flexibility in customizing these machines.

This article has been corrected since it was first published. The new Pentium-M IxS card costs more than the prior Xeon-based IxS card because it includes 1 GB of main memory for the card. Putting 1 GB of main memory on the Xeon-based IxS brings its price up to teh same $2,780 price point as the new Pentium-M card. IT Jungle regrets the error. [Correction made 11/07/04.]