IBM’s Regatta to take on Sun’s Fire

Caroline Humer

NEW YORK: International Business Machines Corp. plans to introduce on

Thursday a mid-to high-end server computer based on its new Power 4 microchip,

aimed largely at companies streamlining their existing systems.

The Armonk, New York-based computing giant says the eServer p690, code-named

Regatta, will compete with Sun Microsystems Inc.'s high-end server, the Sun Fire

15000, introduced last week.

"At the end of the day we get better price and performance than the Sun

Fire," said Rod Adkins, the general manager of the IMB "p series"

of servers running the Unix operating system. Adkins says that IBM's p690 starts

at $450,000 and costs about half as much as Sun's competing product. For

instance, he said, an IBM p690 lists for $760,000 and a comparable Sun Fire

15000 lists for $1.4 million.

IBM is positioning the server, which will begin shipping in December, for

corporate customers that want to consolidate smaller machines and for use in

scientific applications that involve heavy number crunching. Server sales have

cooled off as the Internet infrastructure market faded away. Research firm

International Data Corp. (IDC) said it expects Unix server sales to decline

slightly in 2001 and 2002 from $32.9 billion in 2000.

Sales of servers that cost up to $1 million, or mid-range servers, were $15

billion in 2000 while high-end servers that cost more than $1 million made up

$4.8 billion.

Tough competition



In a sign of just how competitive the Unix server market has become,
Hewlett-Packard Co. earlier this week said it would discount its high-end

Superdome server by adding 10 percent to the price of trade-ins.

IBM, which ranks first in total server sales but is behind Sun in Unix

operating system sales, says the server combines mainframe computing features as

well as the new chip. At least one analyst agrees that's a positive. "The

reason this is different is they've taken a mainframe-centric philosophy, to

keep the server running by sensing failures and working around them," said

Sam Albert, an IT industry analyst at Sam Albert Associates in Scarsdale, New

York.

The p690 is almost twice as powerful as IBM's current top-of-the-line p680

server and its memory bandwidth is more nearly three times as wide, allowing

data to travel from the memory cache to the microprocessor 11 times faster, IBM

said.

Unlike its predecessor chip the Power3, the Power4 contains two 1 gigahertz

microprocessors on the same chip. IBM says that design enables the server to

consume less power. In addition, the eServer p690 is made of palm-sized

8-processor modules that enable it to pack more computing power into the same

space, IBM said.

(C) Reuters Limited 2001.