IBM's new p690 server, code-named "Regatta," will enter general availability on Friday of this week.
And Big Blue is celebrating with an offer to potential customers to finance their lease of a competitive Sun Fire 15K server free-of-charge if they feel the Regatta is not the better product.
The eServer p690 comes with up to 32 Power4 processors, and can be configured as an 8-way, 16-way, 24-way, or 32-way model. It can be logically partitioned into up to 16 partitions, with each logical server containing from one to 16 processors.
Each logical partition can be dynamically reconfigured as needed. Internal storage capacity is up to 4.7 Tbytes. Multiple p690s can be linked together to create servers of over 1,000 processors.
For clients trying to decide whether to invest in a Regatta or a Sun Fire 15K server, IBM is offering a potential zero-percent interest lease on the Sun server.
The catch? Customers looking at acquiring either the Regatta or the Sun Fire server must sit through a demonstration of the Regatta. If they decide to go with the Sun server, IBM Global Financing will offer a zero-percent lease for 24 months or 36 months.
IBM business partners, the company's jargon for solution providers, are looking to use the Regattas to help clients with server consolidation and high-end applications.
Joe Wurtz, vice president of eServer sales at MSI Systems Integrators, an Omaha, Ne.-based business partner, said he is already in deep discussions with three potential clients in the Midwest about the Regatta.
Clients want to consolidate servers regardless of the original vendor, and are looking at Regatta for the expandability and partitioning capability to make that happen, said Stewart Booden, president of Aspen Consulting, a Rolling Meadows, Ill.-based business partner.
Clients are looking forward to the LPAR (logical partitioning) capability of the Regatta, said Wurtz. While Sun was first to offer partitioning, it focused on hardware partitioning, but IBM's Regatta uses software partitioning for true dynamic allocation of resources, he said. As a result, clients will be able to consolidate several smaller servers into one box, and allocate resources as needed, he said.
For customers with high-end applications like ERP, the capability to configure virtual servers according to the needs of specific parts of the application plays well with Regatta, Wurtz said. For example, a virtual server which is used for development during the day could be reconfigured to run databases in the evening, he said.
Those high-end applications are not suitable for departmental computing, and are being moved back into the data center, said Booden. "In this case, Regatta makes sense," he said. "It's a mainframe-class server."
