By Timothy Prickett Morgan
To help boost demand for RS/6000 S7A Blackbird servers as it struggles to meet demand for its new S80 Condor servers, which use IBM’s new 450MHz Pulsar PowerPC copper processor, IBM has cut tags on its older 262MHz Northstar cards for the Blackbirds. Four-way Northstar SMP cards for the S7A now cost $55,000, down 27% from $77,000. IBM is also trying to spur demand for its RS/6000 SP PowerParallel servers, which apparently saw sales drop significantly during the third quarter. Under a special deal that runs until January 31, 2000, SP customers who convert from 66MHz, 77MHz, 120MHz, 135MHz and 160MHz thin and wide SP nodes to either 332MHz PowerPC 604e or 200MHz Power3 thin or wide nodes can get a 45% discount off the upgrade charges to do the conversion.
To help customers move on up to an H70-based high availability HA-70 cluster, which consists of dual RS/6000 servers using the 340MHz Northstar processor, IBM is withdrawing its H50 HA dual- server offering on December 31, 1999. (The HA-50 used the old 332MHz PowerPC 604e engine.) IBM has also withdrawn 4.5Gb disk drives and 64Mb memory cards from the RS/6000 catalog since both are outdated.
On the storage front, IBM cut prices on its Serial Storage Array (SSA) disk subsystems for Unix and NT servers. The price of a 36.4Gb disk for a model 7132 array costs $6,005, down 12% from $6,855. The price of a 9.1Gb 10K RPM disk used in the 7132 arrays dropped by 8% to $2,865 from $3,105. The price on the fatter 18.2Gb 10K disk for the 7132s was similarly cut by 8% to $4,605. The prices for the 9.1Gb and 18.2Gb 10K disks used in the more modern 7133 arrays were also cut by 8% to $2,760 and $4,500 respectively. The 36.4Gb disk used in the 7133s had its price cut by 13% to $5,900. Prices on eight-drive packs for the 7133s were also cut by 9% to $16,800 for eight 9.1Gb drives ($2,100 each), $28,650 for eight 18.2Gb drives ($3,581 each), and $38,100 for eight 36.4Gb drives ($4,762 each). Obviously IBM wants customers to buy more storage to get the better prices. IBM also cut the price of installing an 18Gb disk drive (rather than a 9.1Gb unit) in a base RS/6000 43P Power3-based technical workstation/server by 41% from $1,700 to $1,000. IBM also cut the price of the fast- write cache option for its SSA disk subsystems for RS/6000s and SPs by 59% to $1,500 from $3,700.
IBM also announced that it had added support in its RS/6000 SP parallel server line for its gigabit Fibre Channel PCI bus adapter, which has been available for other RS/6000 servers for some time. It has been available since November 5 on the SPs. The adapter supports a single Fibre Channel loop with 100MBps data rates with fiber optic cabling as long as 500m (1,640 feet). It requires AIX 4.3.3 with APAR IX81852 with the SP’s PSSP version 3.1 or later installed. IBM says that the Fibre Channel adapter is only intended at this point to support attachment of storage arrays through Fibre Channel hubs, and that using the adapter for attaching any other kinds of peripherals is not yet supported. The PCI adapter costs $3,200.
Big Blue also announced a new high-speed communications program for AIX called HIPPI Protocol services that enhances the existing High Performance Parallel Interface (HIPPI) support in AIX 4.2.1, 4.3.2 and 4.3.3. The new program supports the IPI-3, NDA and FP protocols and is used in conjunction with the existing serial HIPPI PCI adapter for RS/6000s and its connectivity program (version 4.2). It costs $2,500.
