CORRECTION RAN TUESDAY (10/19/04)
The first name of Guy Paradise, IBM Corp. manager for new eServer i5 products worldwide, was incorrect in a story on Page 10D Friday. Paradise is based at Rochester, where the i5 servers are designed and made.
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By Bob Freund
freund@postbulletin.com
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IBM Corp. today topped off its Rochester-made brand of business machines with the most powerful model built for the product line.
The eServer i5 595, designed and manufactured at IBM Rochester, can operate with as many as 64 processors at a time and contains four times the working power of the biggest model from the prior generation's, IBM said. It completes the upgrade of the iSeries to IBM's Power5 processors, the company said.
The machine will be built by current workers on existing assembly lines. The new production is not expected to expand the permanent work force at the local factory initially, IBM Rochester spokeswoman Lorie Luedke said.
The new machine will appeal to "enterprise"-size companies, those with more than 1,000 workers, which want to consolidate smaller servers into a single computer to save costs or which just need hefty horsepower, said Glen Paradise. He is the manager for new i5 products worldwide.
The most powerful models in the iSeries generally have appealed to banks, retailers, manufacturers and other companies with large volumes of transactions.
IBM has packaged many of its advanced technologies in the i5 595. It contains IBM's new Power5 processors, which were introduced in May. In processing capacity, the machine is comparable to some mainframe computers.
One key technology called "partitioning" allows the new eServer i5 595 to be split into as many as 254 parts, each with its own operating system and able to act like a separate machine.
"The opportunity for us is (current) iSeries customers who have deployed competitive Unix applications" on several other servers, such as those sold by Hewlett Packard or Sun Microsystems, Paradise said.
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IBM has customers who want to replace "a bunch of servers running at 10 percent (capacity)" with a single, larger server, he said.
The i5 595 also features IBM's "on demand" system. The buyer can order a larger machine than needed but only get charged for the processors actually used. "We'll ship a 64-way (64 processors) system; you pay for 32 of those processors. ... and the remaining 32 are available on demand," Paradise said.
IBM has offered the same "on-demand" pricing in previously released servers in the i5 line. Most came out in May.
The newly announced 595 starts to about $631,000 for a minimum configuration of 16 processors, with eight enabled; it can range to $3 million for a fully enabled, 64-processor model.
This morning, IBM also announced two similar versions based on IBM's version of the Unix operating system: A 64-processor version called the p5 595 and one with 32 processors called the p5 590. Both are made at IBM's factory in Poughkeepsie, N.Y.
The basic operating system for the i5 595 is the proprietary i5 OS, but its partitions can run Linux and the Unix-based systems independently. The machine also can handle Windows with the addition of a specialized server.
All three computers will be available to customers on Nov. 19.
