SAN ANTONIO (02/11/2000) - IBM is starting to break the silence about some of the specific plans it has for its NUMA-Q line of Unix-based Intel servers.
Next week at Sequent's Enterprise Solutions Summit user conference, IBM is expected to announce an upgrade to the operating system of its NUMA-Q line, DYNIX/ptx, to handle Fibre Channel communications with IBM's Enterprise Storage Server, called "Shark." With this move, IBM hopes to lure customers away from EMC, whose Symmetrix boxes are the storage platform of choice for NUMA-Q users.
IBM also wants to prove that NUMA-Q boxes will be tightly integrated into its product lineup.
IBM last summer bought the NUMA-Q unit, formerly Sequent Computer Systems, for $810 million. At the time, observers criticized IBM for adding another Unix flavor to its lineup, which already features AIX. Since the buyout, IBM has said little about its plans for NUMA-Q, except that the company expects to integrate Sequent's nonuniform memory access (NUMA) architecture into other IBM servers.
IBM claims it has tweaked the NUMA-Q Fibre Channel drivers to handle communications with Shark boxes at speeds up to 95M byte/sec per channel. This is just shy of the 100M byte/sec capacity of Fibre Channel protocol. Shark handles up to 11.2 terabytes of data.
IBM hopes coupling Shark with NUMA-Q will be attractive to users running business intelligence, data mining, enterprise resource planning and other applications.
However, selling NUMA-Q to users who need more than data warehousing may be an uphill battle - with or without Shark support, says one vice president of operations who spoke on condition of anonymity. His network has four NUMA-Q boxes running financial applications, and his company plans to phase them out in favor of Hewlett-Packard servers running HP-UX. He says HP is an easier platform to manage because there are more applications and trained IS staff available to work with HP servers.
On the other hand, some hard-core NUMA-Q users are excited by the chance to make their networks as Blue as possible. "Shark would certainly be a key candidate for where we might take our disk subsystems," says Michael Prince, chief information officer at Burlington Coat Factory Warehouse in Burlington, N.J.
The Shark storage server will work with all NUMA-Q servers running DYNIX/ptx 4.4.7. Upgrades for current users are free. An average new NUMA-Q box, including the operating system costs $237,625.
Shark storage server costs from $250,000 to $2 million.
IBM: www.ibm.com or www. sequent.com