IBM markets RISC Linux

Prashant L Rao / Bangalore

Puneet Gupta

“Indian customers don’t need 20 to 32 CPU boxes. A reliable 4-way server will do for most customers. Indian businesses largely fall into the SME category, most customers look at 4-way or 8-way servers,” said Puneet Gupta, country manager of pSeries eServer, IBM India.

In the US it may be an entry-level UNIX box, but in India the p630 is an enterprise server. IBM has just announced p630s with the new Power 4+ processor that ramps up processor speed to 1.45 GHz. The p630 and its bigger brother, the p650 are both ready for Linux. “Linux runs natively on these servers,” said Gupta.

While its competitors, Sun and HP, offer Linux on Intel, IBM is the only one of the big three offering Linux on RISC. To do this it uses dynamic LPAR (Logical Partitioning). Companies can have 2-4 partitions on a 4-way p630. The p630 has reliability and high availability features such as hot plug and the ability to set up logical partitions that span multiple processors or dynamically allocate processors, memory and I/O bandwidth to partitions on the fly.

IBM is marketing these machines to educational institutions, R&D establishments and independent software vendors (ISVs). It has over 50 customers for the p630 and p650 in India. These UNIX servers are capable of running ERP, core banking and databases and HPC (High Performance Computing) applications. IBM had earlier set up a Linux cluster across 62 p630 servers for CDAC.

The operating systems offered are AIX 5 and Linux. Most enterprise software vendors have ported their applications to AIX 5. There’s been a change in IBM’s configurations as well. Earlier Big Blue used to build made-to-order products as per the customer’s specification. Today, it offers express configurations with standard processor and configurations that are more commoditised. Pricing for a 1-way p630 is Rs 15.75 lakh, while a 4-way works out to Rs 35 lakh.