ENGINEERING

ARMONK, NY -- IBM today announced that independent research firm Andrews Consulting Group, Inc. has issued a report stating that AIX (R) 5L, IBM's UNIX (R) operating system, shows clear leadership in crucial areas such as partitioning and price/performance. The report, "IBM's AIX 5L: An Examination of a Next-Generation UNIX Operating System," states that AIX 5L's logical partitioning (LPAR) facility, planned to be made available later this year, will offer advantages over the competition. For example, on Sun Microsystem's latest UltraSparc III servers, each partition must contain at least one I/O block and its associated CPUs. This limits the number of partitions available on these servers. By contrast, the LPAR facility within AIX 5L can create partitions that cross hardware boundaries. This allows users to create a greater number of partitions and improves their control over computing resources. Another area where IBM showed true leadership was in price/performance. "IBM's eServer p680 -- a 24-processor system -- offers better transaction processing performance on the TPC-C benchmark than Sun's 64-way E10000 and Hewlett Packard's 48-way Superdome. With its plans to release 32-way POWER4 servers later this year, IBM should remain highly competitive in this arena," according to the report. Andrews Consulting Group analyst Lee Kroon, author of the report, says that AIX 5L offers significant increases in scalability, capacity and network performance, allowing servers to better accommodate rapidly expanding e-business workloads. He goes on to say that AIX 5L's new features reflect IBM's understanding of how IT infrastructures will evolve into e-infrastructures over the next several years. "Andrews Consulting Group believes that IBM's e-infrastructure philosophy will provide enterprises with maximum flexibility for delivering services across technology boundaries at the lowest possible cost and with the fastest time to value," says Kroon. "As a strategic embodiment of IBM's e-infrastructure philosophy, AIX 5L offers UNIX customers a robust platform for database, transaction, and application server deployments. We recommend that such customers add AIX 5L to their short lists for further evaluation if they have not done so already." The Andrews Consulting Group report also examines AIX 5L's core features, including its strong affinity with Linux. With this release, AIX gains APIs (application programming interface) and header files that allow popular Linux applications to run with a simple recompilation. IBM has also made available the AIX Toolbox for Linux Applications, a collection of open source tools that provides an environment for developing and deploying Linux applications on AIX. "We are pleased that Andrews Consulting Group, a leading expert on the operating system market, has recognized the superiority of AIX 5L, especially its ability to break the barriers between UNIX and Linux," said William Saulnier, program director, AIX Marketing, IBM. "Our competitors have been doing a lot of talking about future Linux compatibility, management solutions and support for the latest platform solutions, but AIX is actually delivering." Some of the other important AIX 5L features examined in the report include: I. Scalability -- AIX 5L offers support for systems with up to 32 processors and 256 GB memory. This release includes the JFS2 file system, which has a demonstrated ability to manage files and file systems of up to one terabyte and a theoretical ability to manage files up to four petabytes. II. e-business performance -- Virtual IP Addressing helps applications remain available if network connections are lost. IP multipath routing improves network reliability by providing multiple paths to a destination. III. System management -- Automated system monitoring tools built into AIX's sophisticated Workload Manager (WLM) provide greater flexibility to customers in managing their computing resources. Reliable Scalable Cluster Technology (RSCT), allows administrators to manage large numbers of AIX servers in parallel without the need for expensive I/O switches or high-speed connectivity fabrics. IV. Security -- MIT's Kerberos V5 Authentication helps administrators simplify password authentication. LDAP-based Security Audit Plug-in provides additional file system audit capabilities. In an overall assessment of AIX 5L the report notes that, "As an application and database server, AIX 5L meets or exceeds the capabilities offered by competitive offerings from other UNIX vendors, and outstrips Windows 2000 in almost all functional categories." The Andrews Consulting Group report closes by stating, "We strongly recommend that enterprises consider AIX 5L, especially in environments where Linux interoperability and support for heterogeneous systems are requirements. With its strengths in these areas, we expect AIX to maintain or gain market share against other UNIX operating systems over the next two to three years." A complete copy of this report, which provides a comprehensive examination of AIX, may be viewed at www-1.ibm.com/servers/eserver/pseries/library/consult/aix5l_andrews.pdf For more information visit www.andrewscg.com or www.ibm.com