INDUSTRY

ARMONK, NY -- IBM introduced an expanded version of its IBM UNIX cluster, enabling businesses to reduce administration costs and floor space usage by consolidating individual servers and managing them from a single point of control. In the commercial world, clusters enable businesses to consolidate servers, or implement large e-business infrastructures or highly-available and massively scalable databases. Built with the company's virtual partitioning technology and management software, the IBM Cluster 1600 has been pre-tested for 32 IBM p690 32-way systems and IBM p670 16-way systems. IBM also offers custom clusters connecting hundreds of servers for both commercial applications and supercomputing. The IBM Cluster 1600 derives much of its workload consolidation power from IBM's logical partitioning technology. The p690 and p670 can either be operated as single large servers or can each be divided into as many as 16 "virtual" servers, running AIX 5L and the Linux operating system in one or multiple partitions. They offer flexible and efficient use of processors, memory and I/O resources, enabling customers to create virtual servers with a single processor or multiple processors. In the near future, the p690 and p670 are planned to be able to dynamically reconfigure partitions -- while still operating -- to meet changing workload demands.