IBM gave both ends of its Intel server line a brush and dust-up today. The premium ccNUMA box that Big Blue acquired from Sequent a couple of years ago is these days given the same branding as the higher-end of the much lower-end PC server range: eServer xSeries. Even though there can be upwards of $500,000 price difference between the two.

Big Blue introduced a partitioned x430 ccNUMA box that runs Sequent's old Dynix/ptx Unix, Linux, Windows 2000 and S/390 apps, and this ships in configurations ranging from four to 64 900MHz Pentium III Xeon CPUs in stand alone mode, or in clusters of 64 to 256 CPUs. Bringing up the rear are three low-end models, the four-way x250 and x350, and eight-way x370 CPUs. These, ah, don't run S/390 applications.

So to sum up: three of the four new servers aren't Sequent NUMA boxes at all, but are really high-end NetFinity kit, although they're also under the same xSeries brand. And NetFinity isn't mentioned at all - that's a separate brand. So the tree dwarves here are kind of a NotFinity brandlet of their own. And IBM wonders why Sun has nicked the top server spot...

We trust that this makes IBM server branding crystal clear. ®