IBM made a number of new Power Systems announcements on October 9 including doubled processor core counts for 520s and 550s running i OS and a new addition to the range in the form of the model 560.

Although increasing the cores to four on the 520 and eight on the 550 may look like bringing Power i up to speed with AIX-driven Power Systems, it seems that the hardware was always the same, it just took a while to officially say so. The announcement merely brings the 520 and 550 into line with the 570 which was "unified" in April, says IBM's UK and Ireland i product manager, Nigel Adams.

"The reason why we didn’t do it all then was, to be blunt, there’s an awful lot of changes that need to be made in configuring and ordering and manufacturing systems," he explains. "We got it done for the 570 by then and the job was too big to get it done in April for the lower-end systems.

"So we knew it was coming, but it was purely a question of going through all of that administrative-type stuff, which is quite considerable. Because the configurations of the boxes when ordered now, compared to what configurations used to look like on i boxes, are actually very different although fundamentally, of course, they are the same box."

IBM is touting the new four, eight or 16 core rack mount model 560 as a competition killer in the Unix space. It claims that customers can save "…up to $840,000 and 83 per cent in energy by consolidating 13 Sun Fire V490 servers on a single Power 560 server with PowerVM, as compared to consolidating the same number on four Sun SPARC Enterprise M5000 servers with dynamic system domains".

Adams comments: "It’s missing one or two things that i customers might want and I think that the primary aim is not for i customers, it's for Unix customers who just want a pretty significant amount of processing power in a limited sized package. But for i customers who have other requirements -- for example, the capacity on demand capability -- I think that the 560 is really of interest but its applicability is more limited in our market place, to be honest."

Other announcements included a new 3.5 GHz processor option for the model 550, a new 450 GB SAS drive and enhancements to the Power 595. The model 570 has also had its core capacity doubled to 32 and has been given a new hot node repair facility, a sophisticated maintenance option.

"Things like hot node repair are extremely important in the i world and we had announced that as a statement of direction," says Adams. "It’s delivered by firmware so there’s no new hardware that gives us this capability. And the ability to remove a node, repair it or add some memory to it and replace it without bringing the system down, is, I think, important."

Adams, who has recently had the title of i franchise leader added to his job description by IBM central command, will be presenting a seminar on the enhancements to i OS (nee OS/400) versions 5.4 and 6.1 at the Scoring with Power conference in Manchester next week. It is important to address both versions of the operating system, he says, as most of the new generation of Power System hardware doesn't actually require a 6.1 upgrade.

The move has echoes of the crossover between OS/400 V5R3 and V5R4. "It doesn’t help sales of new systems if you force people to adopt a new release that they might not be wanting to adopt or in some cases, in the early stages, an application vendor might not have certified for," says Adams. "It’s actually the second time we’ve done it and the aim was not to force people to move in that way. So it was absolutely deliberate and I think it’s a good thing."