IBM Corp’s Power Parallel Systems division has, as reported briefly (CI No 2,599), added a Thin Node 2 SP2 option using the enhanced Power2 processor. It now offers a 66MHz Wide Node, 62MHz Thin Node and 66MHz Thin Node 2; thin node systems are less expandable. A Wide Node 2 with the new Power2 RISC would complete the picture. The company has dropped the price of an existing thin node SP2 by 10% to $138,000: the machine is effectively two 62MHz RS/6000 engines with no Level 2 cache, 128Mb of memory, 2Gb disk and the high-performance switch. And IBM says that a crucial commercial software component, version 3.1.1 of AIX High Availability Cluster Multi-Processing/6000, is now available for SP2s. HACMP/6000 3.1.1 provides support for clusters of up to eight SP2 nodes and costs from $8,000 per node in high-availability mode, $15,500 per node for concurrent access. NetView for AIX, Systems Monitor for AIX and Trouble Ticket for AIX are also now up on the parallel line. IBM says it has got beta test sites running PowerQuery, its DB2 Parallel Edition for AIX, RAID and consulting combo. Power Parallel Systems now claims 350 PowerParallels installed, 120 of them at commercial sites. It expects to sell more technical than commercial systems this year.
