[geeks] IBM Regatta server thoughts

[Bill Bradford]

Went to the customer presentation about it this morning at the IBM
Customer Briefing Center here in Austin (where they develop the POWER-series
CPUs).

Pretty spiffy, although IMHO too much time was spent "explaining" why 
32 of their CPUs (actually 64, if you consider there are two cores on
each "chip") are better than 72 or 106 SPARCs... Touted the crossbar
switch architecture, their implementation, etc...

Saw Derrick there too, but we lost contact after saying hi to each other
at the lobby.

Things I was impressed with:

	- Ability to partition off individual PCI slots for a LPAR 
          (Logical PARtition)

	- Ability to use one of those slots to have individual serial
	  consoles for each LPAR if wanted (otherwise you'd just use
	  the hardware system console).

	- Hot-swap PCI cards in *carriers* - so you dont have to pull out
	  a drawer or backplane, etc, to replace cards.  Supopsedly the
	  carriers will hold *any* industry-standard-size PCI card.

Things I wondered about:

	- Why a *RS232 SERIAL* connection to the system management 
	  console?  They said you could even cut the cord once the LPARs
	  were up and it would keep running - but I woudl think that a
	  dedicated Ethernet connection would be better between the system
	  and the console that was managing it... I guess by using serial,
	  you're not platform-dependent.  One of the slides mentioned that
	  the management applications were *java*.  ick.

All in all, pretty impressive, and the lunch (beef enchiladas) was good, and
on real china too.  They gave away tshirts; my boss won one.

Pretty nice.  Now, I just need to find myself an older RS/6000 43P and 
24-bit graphics card, so I can play with AIX 5L...

Bill

-- 
Bill Bradford
mrbill at mrbill.net
Austin, TX