IBM Archive

The struggle within companies between their software and hardware business can lead to interesting co-opetition, and sometimes disaster. (A most extreme example being Sony's ignominious fall from the top the portable music device heap as a result of its reluctance to disturb its music production arm's legacy business). IBM, of course, is probably the canonical example, with its various partnerships with Microsoft ending up not only with Microsoft on top, but with its own PC hardware business suffering a long decline into oblivion as a result. Big Blue, presumably trying to avoid a replay, has entered into software licensing agreements with, among others, arch-rival Sun. Now, it seems they're backing off on plans to offer Solaris support for GPFS, their shared disk cluster file system.

IBM Research has uncovered work it is doing to bring the brain's processing power to computers, in an effort to make it easier for PCs to process vast amounts of data in real time. The researchers want to put brain-related senses like perception and interaction into hardware and software so that computers are able to process and understand the data quicker while consuming less power, said Dharmendra Modha, a researcher at IBM. The researchers are bringing the neuroscience, nanotechnology and supercomputing fields together in an effort to create the new computing platform, he said.

IBM has marked its 10 years of participation in Linux and open source with an open source code contribution focused on supercomputing.

After 10 years of supporting Linux, IBM continues to challenge Microsoft on multiple fronts and aims to push Linux even further into the enterprise. While IBM has competed and partnered with Microsoft over the last two decades, the Microsoft-free PC effort is perhaps its most direct assault yet. "The idea of Microsoft-free personal computing has been in the air for a while," Inna Kuznetsova, director of Linux at IBM, told InternetNews.com. "We're just partnering with Linux distribution vendors and hardware vendors to make it happen."

IBM is positive about the possibility of bringing out its DB2 under an open source license. While the computing giant has no immediate plans to open source DB2, market conditions may make it unavoidable, according to Chris Livesey, IBM's UK director of information management software. "We have a light version of the product offered for free, which is a step towards exposing our core (DB2) technology," said Livesey. "Looking at IBM's heritage in contributing to the open source market, we've been particularly keen to lead that market. Open source is an interesting space, as a whole. As the future unfolds, and the economics become clearer, there's going to be more commitment to open source by everybody. We've made good steps towards that."

"The rest of the server world can play with their piddling 2-3GHz chips. IBM, meanwhile, is prepared to deal in the 5GHz realm. The hardware maker has unveiled a Power6-based version of its highest-end Unix server - the Power 595. The box runs on 32 dual-core 5GHz Power6 processors, making it a true performance beast. This big box completes a protracted roll out of the Power6 chip across IBM's Unix server line."

IBM has unveiled its latest mainframe, the System z10. The product is designed to improve performance and reduce power requirements and cooling costs. The new machine, based on quad-core technology, is equivalent, in terms of performance to nearly 1500 x86 servers, according to IBM. The z10 is designed to be up to 50% faster and offers up to 100% performance improvement for CPU-intensive jobs compared with its predecessor, the z9, with up to 70% more capacity, IBM said. IBM said the new mainframe would also consume 85% less energy and have a footprint that is up to 85% smaller.

"The Register has unearthed a research paper that shows IBM working on a computing system capable 'of hosting the entire internet as an application'. This mega system relies on a re-tooled version of IBM's Blue Gene supercomputers so loved by the high performance computing crowd. IBM's researchers have proposed tweaking the Blue Gene systems to run today's most popular web applications such as Linux, Apache, MySQL and Ruby on Rails."

"Discover why you need to change your applications and build environments that supply 32-bit-only kernel extensions to accommodate IBM AIX Version 6. With AIX Version 6, the kernel environment is 64-bit kernel only. Previously, the AIX operating system provided both 32-bit and 64-bit kernels, requiring 32-bit and 64-bit kernel extensions. In this article, apply two easy solutions to help you make the transition and start reaping the benefits of the simplified kernel environment."

IBM has introduced a release of its z/OS mainframe operating system with new features that increase the system's security for online commerce and business transactions. IBM officials said the new operating system release is in line with what the company has been calling the renaissance of the mainframe. And as mainframes run a vast portion of the world's financial services, retail and other large businesses, security was a major concern for this latest release, IBM officials said, in Armonk, N.Y.

"IBM and Sun Microsystems did indeed announce an agreement for deploying the Solaris operating system on IBM servers, but it wasn't the system we guessed: IBM will deploy Solaris for its Intel x86-based System x and BladeCenter servers. It's a significant move, as it validates the presence of Sun's operating system among a broad customer base that few can mistake as a "niche." As Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz told reporters today, IBM becomes the first Tier 1 reseller of Solaris products and services for x86 platforms." His blog is here.

IBM has announced a version of its System i business server range that uses the company's Power6 processor, which the tech giant claims is the fastest chip it has ever built. The System i 570 uses the 4.7GHz Power6, launched in May, with up to 16 cores, a processor that has come top in many industry benchmarks.

IBM has opened the AIX 6 beta program. "AIX 6 Open Beta participants will be able to download the AIX 6 beta code, Mozilla Firefox, and updates to enable previously purchased IBM compilers to run on AIX 6."

A team comprised of members from Bell-Labs, IBM Research, Sandia National Labs, and Vita Nuova has completed a port of Plan 9 to the Blue Gene supercomputer. Plan 9 kernels are running on both the compute nodes and the I/O nodes and the Ethernet, Torus, Collective Network, Barrier Network, and Management network are all supported. Screenshots are available on the development blog, and a live-demo will be attempted during the USENIX poster session.