INDUSTRY

SOMERS, NY-- IBM today announced the availability of DB2* Universal Database to customers on the InfiniBand fabric. DB2 is the industry's first database to support the innovative InfiniBand architecture in the marketplace. Building on its long-standing leadership in technology innovation, IBM is the only vendor in the industry to provide customers with database software capable of running on InfiniBand. Customers can now take advantage of the significant improvements in database speed, scalability and efficiency provided by the InfiniBand fabric, running underneath IBM's DB2 database. DB2 fits into the InfiniBand architecture without any modifications posing no extra cost to customers. InfiniBand is a standard architecture that assures high speed connections between computers and storage or to other computers as it reduces the workload on the computers. IDC has predicted that 16 percent of all servers will feature the technology by as early as next year, rising to 80 percent by 2004. In the coming decade some one billion people and millions of businesses will be connected to the Internet. A University of California at Berkeley study shows businesses will create more data in the next three years than has been created since the beginning of time. IBM DB2 running on InfiniBand will help companies more effectively manage this explosive growth of data. The broad industry support for this new communication fabric will greatly increase the flexibility with which customers can combine the scalable capabilities of DB2 with high performance and low latency InfiniBand adapters and switches on a variety of operating systems. Today's announcement underscores IBM's leadership at accelerating the movement of its world class technology from its renowned research and development labs into solutions-based systems for customers to help them build more successful e-businesses. Information technology leaders and IBM partners like SAP, Intel, Network Appliance, InfiniSwitch, InfiniCon Systems, OmegaBand, Lane15, Mellanox and Qlogic all support DB2 on InfiniBand. "We are proud to be expanding our relationship with IBM and partnering with them in developing DB2 InfiniBand Solutions for the data center," said Peter Steinbach, Co-Founder and Vice President Engineering of InfiniSwitch Corporation. "Integrating IBM's leading DB2 Universal Database technology with InfiniSwitch solutions will significantly improve database speed, scalability and efficiency for the data center customer." IBM was the first company in the industry to demonstrate its DB2 Universal Database with a Linux cluster across the InfiniBand architecture in Spring 2001 at the InfiniBand Trade Association Open (IBTA) Conference. At the time, the first-of-its-kind technology demonstration showcased an enterprise application and database running on Intel architecture-based servers. At the Intel Developer Forum in August, DB2 was the acknowledged technology leader with its demonstration of a DB2 cluster running SAP mySAP.com and SAP BW in a heterogenous environment. In another bellwether demonstration in November 2001, IBM demonstrated InfiniBand technologies for hardware, software and microelectronics at the InfiniBand Solutions Conference in Los Angeles. IBM showcased IBM's DB2 database software running on high-end IBM UNIX servers running Linux and WebSphere infrastructure software; IBM Intel-based systems with Windows2000, Linux and Websphere and IBM zSeries mainframes running Linux. About InfiniBand InfiniBand is a switch-based serial I/O architecture, which means that its fabric is a point-to-point switch-based interconnect built for reliability and scalability. Point-to-point switched fabric was first developed and used by IBM in its mainframe programs that utilized a channel-based I/O architecture. More information is available www.infinibandta.org or www.ibm.com