News
IBM May Release Summit Next Month
IBM Corp’s entry intothe high-end Intel server space may come sooner than expected. Reports havecirculated that Big Blue may release its “Summit” scaled-up servers inDecember.
The Summit servers attempt to bring mainframe featuresto the Intel server space. The servers will offer partitioning, redundancy, anda high degree of multiprocessing for users of Windows and other Intel-centricoperating systems, such as Linux.
According to published reports, IBM will bring theservers to market as soon as Intel Corp.releases its Xeon “Foster” chip next month. The first servers will be availablein four-way bricks, which can be connected into a scaled-up configuration via a“scalability port.” The servers will be able to scale up to 16-wayconfiguration.
Unisys Corp.already offers an analogous product with its ES7000 machine, which feature upto 32 processors in a partitionable machine with specialized I/O systems. –ChrisMcConnell