After weeks and weeks of announcements concerning its eServer i5 and p5 products lines, IBM Corp took something of a hiatus last week to focus on the LinuxWorld trade show in San Francisco and the launch of the 64-bit Xeon "Nocona" processors from Intel. However, there is an iSeries slant to these announcements, since IBM did launch a new Integrated xSeries Adapter (IxA) card that can be used with the new Intel servers.

For those who are unacquainted with the IxA cards, here's a brief explanation. For years, IBM has been shipping uniprocessor Integrated xSeries Server (IxS) cards that fit under the skins of the AS/400, iSeries, and, now, the i5 servers.

These servers originally ran OS/2, NetWare, and Windows, and allowed IBM to offer hybrid environments that let OS/400 do what it does best--transaction processing against a relational database--and work in conjunction with other print and file server environments.

Eventually, IBM killed off everything but Windows support on these servers, but it has just promised that, sometime before the end of the year, it will allow Linux to run on these IxS cards.

The IxS is very useful, particularly as an infrastructure server doing Web, print, file, or e-mail serving, or as an application server, perhaps running the Windows version of the application servers that drive the PeopleSoft EnterpriseOne suite while the database behind it is DB2/400, running on the OS/400 platform.

Even though the IxS is running Windows, it gets a partition of an OS/400 server's disks and is managed by OS/400. This makes the Windows environment more resilient (for very complex reasons), and it allows OS/400 shops to have a single disk array, under the control of OS/400 and accessible to iSeries tape drives, for both their OS/400 and Windows workloads.

Source: Computer Business

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