AIX Tip of the Week

AIX Tip of the Week: September 1999 Announcement Summary

Audience: AIX Administrators, Managers

Date: September 14, 1999

IBM announced new RS/6000 hardware and software this week. The primary hardware announcement involved the S80, a new copper chip based server, that triples performance over the S7A, with only twice the CPU's. The software announcement involved AIX 4.3.3 with significant web and workload balancing enhancements. For details, see the RS/6000 web page at www.rs6000.ibm.com. A following is a summary of the announcements:

Hardware

RS/6000 S80
  • 24 Way - 450 MHz Copper Based CPU
  • 64 GB Memory
  • Three times the TPC-C performance of the S7A, with only twice the CPU's
  • 1.6 times the SpecWeb performance of the previous SpecWeb leader
  • Leading SAP performance (15% higher that SUN UE10000 with 64 CPU's)
  • Upgrade path from S70

  • RS/6000 B50
  • 3.5" Rack mounted server targeted for ISV/ISP (up to 20 Servers in one rack)
  • 375 MHz CPU
  • 1 GB Memory
  • 36.4 GB Internal Disk
  • AIX and Linux Support
  • SP Power3 SMP Node
  • 8Way, 64 Bit SMP High Node
  • RS/6000 T/70
  • 8Way Power3 SMP Server (numeric intensive)
  • Disk
  • Price reductions of up to 23% for internal 9.1 and 18 GB SCSI and SSA disk
  • Ultra2 SCSI (80MB/s)
  • Standard base 4.5GB disk increased to 9.1 GB as standard (no additional charge)
  • Memory
  • Up to 29% price reduction on S-Model memory.
  • Model Conversions
  • S70 to S80 Upgrade
  • F50 to H70 Upgrade
  • SP Silver to Power3
  • Software

    AIX 4.3.3
  • New "Workload Management" facility to manage allocation of system resources (CPU, Memory)
  • Kernel enhancements that significantly improve web performance
  • Network Quality of Service (manages allocation of network bandwidth by process)
  • Internet security enhancements
  • JFS enhancements
  • Raid 0+1
  • Java 2
  • Perl 5
  • Online JFS Backup
  • Bonus Pack
  • Chili Soft (Web support for Microsoft ASP)
  • SCO Tarantella (web enables applications with minimal effort)