One could be forgiven for thinking IBM Corp’s non-AIX PowerPC ventures – namely Windows NT and Solaris for the PowerPC – had withered and died since the Power Personal Systems Division was dismembered and the mortal remains shovelled into RS/6000. The company has already stopped shipping Power Series machines with NT installed. However on February 20, reports today’s issue of our sister paper Unigram.X, IBM will announce full marketing and service support for Solaris and NT on its PowerPC 604-based PCI/AT bus 43P series workstations, E20 workgroup servers and future boxes. IBM’s US sales force will get the same commission whether they sell AIX-, NT- or Solaris-based boxes – itself a big deal internally. There won’t be a full 64-bit RS/6000 in any shape or form out of IBM this year, although it claims it does now have a plan that it is keeping close to its chest. On the same Tuesday the company’s software group will land its Eagle project, a collection of seven servers, including a software suite comprising transaction processing, database, communications and Internet bundled on a compact disk for its servers, from which users will be able to choose the bits they want. Meantime, IBM says its SP2 parallel systems are getting heaps of interest from commercial types consolidating their decision support, transaction processing and server operations, although third parties say that most interest is coming from dilettantes kicking the tyres on the things rather than serious commercial users. In April IBM will lift the veil on a new, faster version of its 40Mbps Vulcan SP2 switch and unleash improved TCP/IP performance.
