The company will begin selling Linux on its entire pSeries line of Unix servers, will cut the product line's prices, and will bring faster 1.9GHz Power4+ chips to the top-end p690 model.
Until now, Big Blue has offered Linux only on a handful of lower-end pSeries machines, which more often run IBM's version of Unix, called AIX. Now IBM will sell SuSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 8 or Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 3 on all the pSeries systems, the company said. IBM arranges for the Linux companies themselves to deliver the software to customers.
Linux runs on many different processors, including Intel's Itanium and Hitachi's SH, but it's most widely used on Intel-compatible x86 chips such as Pentium and Xeon. IBM is trying hard to spread Linux to its Power-based servers, now an initiative with its own profit and loss accounting.
Price cuts range for the previous top-end machine with a 1.7GHz Power4+ range from 12 to 15 percent, according to IBM. Prices for the p690 with 1.5GHz processors were cut, 12 to 16 percent, and prices for the 16-processor p670 with 1.5GHz processors were cut 9 to 14 percent.
The new p690 system also can accommodate twice as much memory -- as much as 1 terabyte, roughly 4,000 times the amount in a typical PC.
The moves come in the midst of a highly competitive Unix server market in which IBM has been gradually gaining share at the expense of No. 1 Sun Microsystems and No. 2 Hewlett-Packard. Sun and HP have just introduced new top-end servers, though: the Sun Fire E25K using Sun's UltraSparc IV chips and the SuperDome using HP's PA-8800.
IBM's p690 recently returned to the top spot in a server speed test for keeping track of simulated inventory transactions. HP Superdomes using Intel's Itanium processor have led the list for most of the last year, and Intel's head of server processors, Mike Fister, said last week that he expects an Intel-based system will reclaim the lead soon.
