IBM ties supercomputer to servers with Blue Hammer

IBM has ported the software that ties together its supercomputers to its S80 enterprise server range.

The release, codenamed Blue Hammer, uses the management capabilities of IBM's supercomputers to cluster RS/6000 S80 enterprise servers together.

Mark Lilleycrop, analyst at Xephon, said there is suddenly a lot of activity in the top end of the Unix market from IBM, HP, Compaq and Unisys, after Sun had enjoyed a period of dominance.

"There is a lot of focus on the consolidation of Unix," he said. "This is aimed at pulling together the resources on distributed Unix servers and potentially pulling workloads off NT."

A spokeswoman for IBM said these kinds of management features were previously put together on the fly, by companies piecing together different servers and components.

"In a nutshell, Blue Hammer makes managing multiple servers easier by using supercomputing software to knit the cluster together," she said.

"Just as IBM connects multiple systems in its ASCI White supercomputer with its PSSP software, now ebusinesses can use the same software to connect their S80 Unix servers together and manage it all with one system administrator."

IBM claimed that managing all of the S80 servers in the cluster simultaneously can lead to a lower cost of ownership, by automating tasks across numerous servers.

Lilleycrop said enterprises used clustering to tackle issues of performance and availability.

"It's all to do with how many nines there are after the 99 per cent uptime," he said. "If you're clustering Unix and the technology is resilient, with failover technology, you can drive up the availability."