IBM Plans Big Hardware Upgrade Next Year
Added 19th Oct 2009IBM disclosed the plans at a time when server sales among all vendors have taken a bruising during the economic downturn, and IBM is no exception. Mark Loughridge, IBM's chief financial officer, said that the company's third quarter mainframe revenue declined by 26% from the year-earlier period. Nonetheless, he said IBM is optimistic about the hardware business in the near future in a climate of what he called a return to "general stability."
The new Power7 chip will offer up to eight cores and increase support for virtualized environments, executives said. IBM has slowly be releasing specs for Power7, which it says will support 1,000 virtualized machines, almost four times the 254 supported by the dual core Power6 chip that was released in 2007. IBM's Power chips support AIX, Linux and the older System I computers.
IBM released its last mainframe, the z10 , in February, 2008, and typically releases a new mainframe every three years. If it keeps with that schedule, the new mainframe probably won't be shipping until late next year.
Gordon Haff, an analyst at Illuminata Inc. in Nashua, N.H., said IBM's next mainframes may help users cut costs by allowing them to move some of the mainframe processing to IBM x86 systems. In a hybrid system, the mainframe may handle the service management and data storage with the x86 systems performing some of computational work, said Haff.
The ability to offload mainframe work to the x86 systems of multiple vendors is one of the reasons cited by the Computer and Communications Industry Association (CCIA) trade group in its effort to trigger a new antitrust inquiry into IBM practices by the Department of Justice. The trade group claims that IBM is blocks third party vendors from offering such an offloading capability.
