By William Fellows

IBM Corp will begin offering versions of its NetFinity WinTel servers clustered using the high-performance SP switch from its RS/6000 Unix division by the end of the year. They are likely to be announced around the time of PC Expo in New York, a year after IBM made its initial announcement around PC server clustering. Eschewing Microsoft Corp’s Wolfpack clustering mechanism for Windows NT, IBM will offer its own Phoenix services as the primary clustering environment although it emphasizes it will work alongside Wolfpack where it already exists. It says that Phoenix will handle configurations and services Wolfpack can’t yet touch. It already offers six-way clusters with Oracle Parallel Server with eight-ways to come.

IBM’s HACMP-E systems software, which is offered for configuring high-availability configurations on all RS/6000s will be superseded by the Phoenix clustering services late this year. IBM can’t use Phoenix as a brand name because it has already been taken so it will continue to refer to the services as the rather dry RSCS, RS/6000 cluster services. Phoenix, to which S/390-based policy management and application configuration is being added, will be embedded directly into AIX Unix. Some features are being made over in Java.

Phoenix will be added to AIX in all of its flavors, including the Monterey64 version being created for use on Intel IA-64 servers in conjunction with Santa Cruz Operation Inc and Sequent Computer Systems Inc. Indeed Phoenix will be fitted with a global system image courtesy of SCO. IBM says SCO is further ahead in some single image technologies and is scrapping some of its own development in favor of its partner’s work. Phoenix also gets a newly integrated version of IBM’s GPFS clustered file system enabling different systems to access to same file or data at the same time without any loss of integrity. IBM’s ccNUMA strategy has yet to be handed down, but it is known to have been working on several mechanisms, including S-COMA.

In April IBM is expected to make over its four-way PowerPC 604e H50 and HA-50 RS/6000s with the 64-bit RS64-II Northstar PowerPC chip which already features in the Raven servers and AS/400s. It claims 11% of its RS/6000 business are HA sales. á