NEWS BRIEFS
Sydney, Australia — As Newsbytes reported, Although they’ve not yet been officially released IBM Australia has already signed up two Australian sites for its new Unix- based servers.
The sites, Web Wombat in Melbourne and the Bunnings home building products group in Perth, are claimed to be among the first in the world with Big Blue’s new Unix technology, with which the industry giant believes it can topple Sun Microsystems [NASDAQ:SUNW] as No 1 Unix server vendor.
Aussie Internet search engine Web Wombat next week cranks up an RS/6000 S80 to help lift its traffic from a million hits a day to tens of millions, and to index more than 100 million Web pages according to IBM’s RS/6000 product manager Simon Chappell.
The refrigerator-sized S80 – close cousin to IBM’s chess champion Deep Blue supercomputer – with up to 24 copper-based processors is claimed to outperform Sun’s 64-processor servers. Australian prices start at A$590,000 (US$384,444).
Bunnings is using two clustered S80s, worth a cool million or so, as a Web e- commerce server and to simultaneously handle back office and ERP applications.
Chappell is eagerly looking to good sales of the smaller rack-mountable Pizzazz, or RS/6000 B50 servers for ISPs and ASPs – somewhat more affordable at A$7,333 ($4,778) apiece. It will eat heavily into Sun’s Netra market, he predicts.
The new models are the first to use IBM’s AIX 4.3.3, which introduces the Project Monterey technology worked up in alliance with SCO. The Pizzazz B50 also runs under Linux.
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