COMMERCIAL NEWS
San Diego, CALIF. — Clint Boulton reports that IBM Corp. continued its hot hand of wheeling and dealing last Monday with the release of the world’s most powerful UNIX cluster system dedicated to Web-based commerce.
Dubbed “Blue Hammer,” the amped cluster ushers in a new era of manageability for commercial UNIX systems, using IBM’s Parallel System Support Programs (PSSP) – management software first developed for the RS/6000 SP supercomputer – to cluster up to 16 ultra-powerful S80’s that can scale to 384 copper microprocessors.
Translation: This will save e-commerce sites a lot of time in processing functions.
The cluster is convenient because it uses the PSSP software to provide system administrators with a single point of control where all of the servers may be configured in one shot.
What’s more, the revamped S80 cluster was designed to scale higher than ever – from two 12-way systems up to sixteen 24-way systems, allowing customers to add servers and manage them as demand soars.
The S80 cluster is available immediately, but it doesn’t come cheap. Base configuration for the high-end server begins at $705,000. IBM also plans to expand the S80 cluster solution to include its 80-class UNIX midrange servers – the M80 and H80 – by the end of the second quarter 2001.
IBM also made another e-commerce play by partnering with Works.com in offering its products to the online purchasing service’s 2.9 million business clients. This includes the aforementioned ThinkPad notebook series, PCs, monitors and printers, all to be sold on the Works.com Marketplace.
As if Big Blue’s product releases and technology partnerships aren’t high profile enough, the top dog of B2B e-commerce research publications BtoB, said Monday that the titan aced a perfect score in the list of about 700 sites considered, edging out FedEx and Merrill Lynch.
Fields of study for this research include “ease of use,” “good navigation,” “e-commerce enabled” and “great organization.”
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