IBM Corp says it will use the NUMA-Q server line it acquired with the purchase of Sequent Computer Systems earlier this year to front the expansion of its business intelligence initiatives and better compete with Sun Microsystems Inc at the high-end of the BI market. Under an announcement issued Monday, IBM said it has opened up a new $13m teraplex integration center to enable customers to build and design their BI and data warehousing implementations using NUMA-Q distributed shared memory technology and servers.
IBM already has teraplex centers (so named because they are aimed at customers with over a Terabyte of data in their data warehouses) for its own four platforms; the RS/6000, AS/400, S390 and Netfinity, but this is the first time Big Blue has made any announcements around NUMA-Q. It is also the first offering that will help IBM compete seriously against Sun in the high-end data warehousing market, where up to now IBM has enjoyed little success.
According to Aslam Khader, senior manager for IBM’s NUMA-Q solutions group, opening up the center gives IBM immediate access to 50 new data warehousing customers, to add to the 120 across IBM’s other server and mainframe lines. ‘This announcement legitimizes NUMA-Q as part of IBM’s business intelligence strategy for both its sales organization and its customers, Khader said. Sequent had being doing BI on NUMA-Q for some time and we had developed considerable expertise in that field. Now we can bring those good practices and defined methodologies to new customers.
The center will be run principally by ex-Sequent staff, but Khader added that IBM also plans to bring in some of its own expertise from within its global business intelligence solutions organization. The aim to get customers to use IBM technology by allowing them to plan, develop and future-proof their BI strategies for free, he said.
The center will at first focus on IBM DB2 and Oracle databases, although IBM admits there’s more interest for Oracle databases at the high-end BI market. It hopes to address that with DB2 Extended Enterprise Edition, due next month. So far, DB2 on NUMA- Q is currently in beta and will be available to customers in the early part of next year, Khader said.
In addition, IBM is optimizing its other software offerings, for example its Intelligent Miner data-mining product, for the NUMA-Q platform, as well as delivering Online Analytic Processing on DB2 for NUMA, through its relationship with Hyperion.
Khader said IBM was also in the process of porting NUMA-Q technology to its own mainframe and server lines – although he added it was too early to announce specific details. But as we reported last month, plans to introduce distributed shared memory into its RS/6000 Unix server lines are already well under way.
An extended version of a simple cache only memory architecture (S-COMA) which it has code-named LA ccNUMA (for Local Access), is being developed to enable main memory to be shared between a cluster of SP parallel systems, while maintaining a some traditional programming APIs. First to market though, will be a classic ccNUMA architecture that will enable, say, four SMP RS/6000s to share a single copy of AIX and main memory, albeit with some of the latency ccNUMA implies.
