IBM announced a bunch of stuff yesterday:
1) IBM announced their POWER6 CPUs, with clock speeds up to 4.2 GHz. Sweet. These machines will run AIX, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4. The mainframe folks at IBM have been working on getting the open systems outfitted with a lot of the technology that makes mainframes so reliable, and all that work is paying off.
2) They announced AIX 6, which will feature Solaris Zone-like functionality, called “Workload Partitions,” among a number of incremental updates to support the new hardware. They are also going to do an open beta. Looks like they are learning from Sun.
3) IBM announced their “Live Partition Mobility” where you can move virtualized partitions between running AIX hosts. They claim they are the first to do this without having to “disruptively reboot” the OS. Maybe they haven’t heard of VMware’s VMotion.
VMware might be king of x86 virtualization, but IBM sure looks serious about virtualization on a large scale, for the kinds of workloads people would never think about putting in VMware.
