IBM injects Power4+ into low-end

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By Ashlee Vance in San Francisco • Get more from this author

Posted in Servers, 27th May 2003 17:13 GMT

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IBM's Power4+ processor has managed to slither all the way through the company's Unix server line.

A pair of new low end servers - the p615 models 6E3 and 6C3 - are the latest systems to have 1.2GHz Power4+ chips, IBM announced on Tuesday. The Power4+ processor is a follow on to the Power4 chip IBM introduced in 2001. IBM has already put the faster Power4+ chip in its midrange and high end kit.

Out of all the Unix vendors, Sun Microsystems tends to tout itself as the king of low end Unix kit. With this is mind, IBM has been eyeing the low end Unix market for some time. The company has said that its upcoming Power5 processor will show higher performance than current chips on low end and midrange types of server tasks.

In the meantime, users can pick between the tower p615 6E3 or the rack mount (4U) 6C3 systems. Both ship with one or two processors, up to 16GB of memory and over 1,000GBs of internal storage.

The servers also have six hot-swap PCI-X slots, a service processor, redundant cooling and eight hot-swap disk bays.

IBM does offer its Unix/RISC systems with SuSE Linux as an option. Users who pick the Linux configuration can save money on some of the larger servers.

A two processor p615 6C3 with 2GB of memory, for example, starts at $8,995 with Linux and $9,995 with AIX.

IBM later this year plans to add the p615 as an option with its pre-packaged Unix cluster the Cluster 1600. ®