IBM Corp has an undisclosed agreement with Santa Clara, California-based Auspex Systems Inc that has been months in the making, under which it will buy the high-end NS 5000 Auspex server, and market it under an OEM agreement, today’s issue of Unigram.X reports. IBM is said to be in the process of installing the first wave of machines and may not yet be at the two dozen mark. Down the road, IBM is apparently hoping to supplant the Motorola Inc 680X0 and Sun Microsystems Inc Sparc chips that Auspex currently uses, by its own RS/6000 engines: in the past Auspex has said it would like to take the IBM part on board. Things have not yet reached that point however, and IBM’s initial installations are the 68000 boxes running the Auspex operating system, an undercover version of SunOS. IBM is snubbing the Sparc-based machines so as not to give aid and comfort to the enemy. It will eventually substitute AIX. Sources interpret the move as evidence IBM recognises that mainframes are doomed, and, in keeping with its reorganisation into more quick-footed business units, is unleashing AIX onto mainframe-class servers. The Auspex machines, uniquely architected, are input-output file servers designed to be used for Network File System file sharing, not for applications.
