In-Depth

Inside IBM

• 05/01/2000

IBM has new BI support and solutions for AS/400, targeted to small- and medium-sized businesses, and designed to offer an immediate return on investment. The new services include DB2 OLAP Server and QMF for Windows, along with a new supply chain-targeted BI solution from Silvon Software and the SPSS BI product.

IBM also signed a re-marketing agreement with BI software vendor Dimensional Insight (DI). The agreement enables IBM marketing representatives and IBM Business Partners to provide DI’s customized BI solutions to customers in North America.

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IBM’s Magstar 3590 Tape Cartridge has doubled in capacity, and the new Peer-to-Peer Virtual Tape Server is designed to provide no single point of failure.

The cartridge has a capacity of 40 gigabytes (up to 120 gigabytes with 3:1 compression) for the Magstar 3590 Model E and 20 gigabytes (up to 60 gigabytes with 3:1 compression) for the Model B. A single 3590 Model E11 tape drive may now provide up to 1.2 terabytes of capacity. The cartridge tape will support Magstar 3590 tape drives on selected S/390, AS/400, RS/6000, NUMA-Q, Sun, HP and Windows NT systems.

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Fluor Corporation and IBM plan to create a global business-to-business e-market that will offer services and capital goods required to build, operate and maintain industrial and commercial operations. Initially, the e-market is intended to serve capital goods buyers and sellers in the manufacturing, telecommunications, pharmaceutical, petroleum, consumer products and chemicals industries.

IBM procured $13 billion in goods and services on the Web in 1999. Since 1994, the effort to Web-enable the company’s procurement systems has resulted in savings of $6 billion.

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Ariba, i2 Technologies and IBM have formed a broad, strategic alliance to deliver a solution for business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce and collabor-ation.

This alliance includes the integration of technologies, global marketing and selling of targeted solutions, and an equity investment from IBM into both Ariba and i2.

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IBM has created software that can save companies the trouble of reprogramming their Internet content for display on handheld and wireless devices. The Java-based software automatically converts data written in HTML or XML into languages used by these devices, such as the Wireless Markup Language, during transmission.

The GartnerGroup says that in four years, 70 percent of new cellular phones and 80 percent of PDAs will have access to the Internet. Growth in the wireless market is driving IBM to develop ways to modify Web content for wireless devices.

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IBM introduced the industry’s first supercomputer powered by copper chip technology.

Fortified with copper, the new RS/6000 SP supercomputer is poised to be a workhorse in the scientific and technical arena, where researchers address incredibly complex problems. At the same time, the new RS/6000 SP provides mid-sized corporations with the computing power to tackle challenging business problems.

The new SP node is based on the 64-bit, 375 MHz POWER3-II microprocessor, a RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computing) chip developed for IBM’s RS/6000 servers and workstations. Although aimed at applications, such as the analysis and simulation programs used by aerospace, automobile and drug manufacturers, the chip is also optimized for data intensive applications, like data mining.

The power of the POWER3-II microprocessor is derived in part from IBM-pioneered copper wiring. Copper increases microprocessor performance substantially, compared with chips that use traditional aluminum wire. A single POWER3-II chip – about the size of a thumbnail – contains a quarter mile of copper wiring.

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The IBM Solution Series for the SAP Business Information Warehouse (SAP BW), the first result of the platform co-development activities between IBM and SAP AG, is now available.

The IBM Solution Series for SAP BW is available on a range of servers, such as S/390, RS/6000, AS/400 and Netfinity brand servers. Sample configurations are available for small, medium and large requirements with highly accurate IBM server sizing methodologies. For customers looking to implement highly scalable SAP BW solutions, the IBM DB2 Universal Database Enterprise Extended Edition is the only database available today that provides high-performance multi-node parallel computing on clusters of SMP servers or large SMP servers for the Release 2.0 of SAP BW.

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The NUMACenter Director, a Web-based console for IBM’s NUMACenter systems, provides a centralized, secure point of control for systems management across a mixed Windows NT/2000 application and UNIX environment. NUMACenter Director and the pre-integrated NUMACenter server environment lower the cost of running multiple OSes in the same system by reducing complexity, easing administration and improving system availability.

NUMACenter is an application delivery engine, including up to 104 Netfinity application and Web servers running Windows NT/2000 and a NUMA-Q database server with up to eight nodes housing up to 64 processors each running UNIX in a single system environment with consolidated storage and back-up systems.

For more information about the IBM NUMA-Q brand, call (800) 257-9044, or visit www.ibm.com/servers.