The certification is a testament that IBM’s Software Group will chase down money wherever it can find it. It is also interesting that IBM is, according to NEC officials, using the AzuzA server internally as the platform to build and test Itanium versions of its own database.

Two years ago, when IBM announced that it would license its Summit technology to server makers who wanted to build high-end Xeon and Itanium machines that could scale to 8, 16, and some day 32 processors, the company was able to initially get NEC and rival Fujitsu to sign up.

Summit-based machines

Neither vendor has said much about their Summit-based machines since that time, but if you poke around in different operating units of NEC, you will discover that the company does sell a machine called the Express5800/180-Rd, which is indeed a Summit server rebranded with the NEC label. But the company has been emphasizing its own next-generation of AzuzA machines, the Express5800/1000 series, which scale from 8 to 32 Itanium 2 processors and from 64GB to 512Gb of main memory and which run either Windows or Linux; Hewlett-Packard is a longtime Unix partner of NEC, and the AzuzA servers also support the HP-UX variant of Unix.

IBM is already shipping a 32-way xSeries 445 server using 32-bit Xeons and a 16-way xSeries 455 server using 64-bit Itaniums. The company has said it can scale the Itanium box to 32 processors in a single image, but has not done that. The word on the street is that IBM is going to try to push the Summit architecture up to 64-way processing this year with the third generation of its NUMA-alike Summit chipset and the forthcoming 64-bit Potomac Xeon processors from Intel.

But, depending on how the market swings, IBM and NEC partner to save money on Itanium server engineering. IBM, which wants its own 64-bit Power processors to thrive, has no great love for Itanium. While it would be surprising to see NEC and IBM join up to promote a common X86 enterprise server platform, stranger things have happened.

Reselling opportunities

In any event, Mike Mitsch, director of alliances at NEC Solutions America had nothing at all to say about the prospects of IBM reselling AzuzA, but he did laugh when ComputerWire pointed out that the AzuzA box probably scaled better on IBM’s own database software running Windows and Linux on Itanium than it would even with 64-bit memory extensions on the Xeon-based Summit machines of IBM design. You’ll have to draw your own conclusions, he added.

Mr Mitsch did talk about IBM’s use of DB2 on AzuzA as an Itanium reference platform and as a compile engine as it actually makes new builds of DB2 in its software labs. He also said that IBM, Intel, and NEC were working together to foster and validate solution stacks on Itanium servers running Windows and Linux. He wouldn’t say how much money the three vendors have ponied up for this task, but said it was in the seven-figures range.

The interesting thing about DB2 support on the NEC iron is that it helps better bridge the gap from IBM, NEC, Fujitsu, and Hitachi mainframes – which supported the mainframe variant of DB2 – to x86-architecture systems. This may not mean much in the States or Europe, but back in Japan, where the economy has been struggling for nearly two decades, there is still intense pressure to cut costs.

Alliances bring benefits

Oracle’s market penetration for databases on mainframes was never particularly high, and support for DB2 actually makes NEC’s life easier in its own customer base. Such an alliance might also help long-time IBM partner Bull, which with NEC supports the GCOS mainframe environment. Bull has its own line of Itanium machines, called NovaScale, that support Windows, Linux, and GCOS. These Bull machines only scale to eight processors currently, and only support GCOS across four of them. Bull is working on a more scalable NovaScale box, and it could end up partnering with NEC to get to it, too.

Then again, all three – IBM, NEC, and Bull – could go their separate ways. This is what happened to Unisys after it got HP, Compaq – which was a separate company – and Dell to agree to resell its ES7000 line in mid-2000.