IBM on Tuesday is unveiling its much talked about PowerPC-based blade system, giving the company both 32-bit and 64-bit offerings in the compact form
factor.
factor.
The two-way BladeCenter JS20, featuring the 1.6GHz PowerPC 970 chip, will run both SuSE AG Linux Enterprise Service 8 and Turbolinux Inc.’s Enterprise
Service 8, according to Karl Freund, vice president of pSeries products and strategy for the Armonk, N.Y., company. It will support IBM’s Unix flavor,
AIX, in mid-2004, Freund said. It will come with 512MB of memory, and can fit in the chassis used by IBM’s Xeon-based blade servers. Fourteen blades
can fit in a rack, and the PowerPC 970 blades can work alongside the Xeon blades in the same rack, he said.
The JS20, announced at the Supercomputing show in Phoenix, will be generally available in March 2004, with pricing starting at $2,699.
Link: eweek.com
