Regatta Server Doubles iSeries High-End Performance
by Cheryl Ross
News Editor

April 29, 2002 \ufffd Today\ufffds much anticipated iSeries Power4 hardware announcement continues IBM\ufffds emphasis on the high end. While Rochester has repackaged some of its midlevel iSeries boxes and has previewed new upgrade paths for the i270s, the only brand new system making its debut with this announcement is the i890, a machine so big and powerful that IBM just comes right out and calls it a mainframe.

i890 Regatta Server
The 32-way i890 nearly doubles the processing power of the i840 to 37,400 CPW (Figure 1). The 1.3 GHz Power4 chips cram 174 million transistors onto two processors and enable the i890 to crank out transactions so fast that it consumes energy at a breakneck pace, requiring 3-phase power and dissipating up to 25,000 kBTUs of heat per hour.

The i890 triples the I/O capacity of last year\ufffds i840, supporting up to 72 TB of disk, 2,047 disk arms, and 256 GB memory. The machine also connects up to 32 Integrated xSeries Adapters (IXAs) and offers up to 534 MB of L2/L3 cache.

The i890 is available in 24/32-way and 16/24-way Capacity Upgrade on Demand (CUoD) features, as well as 32-way and 24-way base processors. It requires V5R2. Pricing starts at $1.7 million.

However, customers who want the i890\ufffds processing power need to carefully plan how the goliath system will fit into their shops \ufffd over and above rewiring for 3-phase power, in many cases. The i890 is 6 feet, 8 inches tall and, at 1,760 lbs, weighs close to a ton. Getting it through some doors and elevators could be a problem, and standard raised computing room floors could collapse under its weight. Although it\ufffds equipped with acoustical doors to muffle the noise of its cooling fan, most shops would want to run it in a separate machine room away from people\ufffds workspaces.

Capacity Upgrade on Demand
The standard packaging for the i890 is CUoD. Since CUoD\ufffds introduction last year, about 30 percent of the customers who opted for CUoD have turned on one or more of their dormant processors \ufffd but those customers paid a premium for that flexibility.

With this release, Rochester is lowering the price of CUoD so that customers won\ufffdt be penalized for that built-in upgrade potential. IBM is also repackaging its i830 and i840 systems so that every machine with more than four processors will have CUoD as a standard features. With the i830, i840, and i890, interactive processing power will be available only on the CUoD models. In conjunction, IBM is extending the base processor features of its 270 and 820 line to the 830, 840, and 890 (Figure 2). Many customers who\ufffdve come to the iSeries from other platforms simply don\ufffdt use interactive, IBM says, so the company decided to not offer interactive in the base models across all iSeries lines so that it could price the batch-only systems more aggressively.

Although IBM hasn\ufffdt announced plans to withdraw the previous configurations of the i830 and i840 systems, the company expects the newer offerings to price them out of the market.