Whilst the legal battle over Oracle removing development on the Itanium chip rumbles on IBM are increasing market share by offering a number of solutions to those customers who are fed up with either Oracle, HP or both.

Fed up with Oracle? IBM continue to develop and support the DB2 database platform on Itanium

LTO-5 has now been announced for the IBM tape range... well, the TS3100, TS3200, and TS3500 anyway. If you want LTO-5 for the TS3310 unfortunately you'll have to wait a little bit longer.

A quick technical summary, LTO-5 has a native data transfer of up to 140 MB/sec. and a 1.5 TB Data Cartridge uncompressed, or up to 3TB with the drive's 2:1 compression. It also continues to follow the LTO standard of writing back one generation and reading back two, ensuring that your LTO-3 and LTO-4 tapes still have some life in them. Finally  the drive also has a 8-Gbps Fibre Channel dual-ported interface on the back end, so you can finally have a more resilient connection through to the drive itself when connected to a SAN.

Storage at it's most fundamental level is a bucket, where you store useful stuff that you may or may not want again later. Of course what you put that stuff into can vary in design; it might not be a bucket but a box instead, or a sieve, or a safe, or the dog's basket because he never sleeps in the damned thing anyway. Likewise with disk based storage there are various methods to implement a storage subsystem design, all slightly different, all have their own way of doing things.

As much as I'd like to say that IBM is faultless and standing proud above the competition, I can't say that in good conscience. Sometimes I feel nothing but frustration towards IBM and their desire to make things so unnecessarily complex and difficult. This is especially true when it comes to customer support, though in fairness to IBM this seems to be a common trend with most hardware or software vendors these days.

As a result I sometimes see support as a "wall". Not because a wall is a fundamental element to any building providing both reinforcement and safety for the overall structure, but simply because that's what it feels like my head is banging against when I'm talking with them.

We all know the pitch, consolidate your storage, virtualise your servers and share the infrastructure where possible  through use of a blade based solution for the best possible TCO.  Why would anyone do anything else? We are all agreed. OK lets look at some prices to back up our cost busting claims. I have used list prices throughout. Discounts will vary according to customer, vendor and the time of year.

Example 1

Customer has been buying HP-UX servers and storage for one application and IBM AIX servers and storage for another application that often sit together in the same rack. Would it make sense for both systems to use the same storage? Of course it will. OK what's is the price? The HP storage being used is an MSA60 SAS attached with 9 disks....

It's been a busy couple of months within IBM, and it seems that in this case Christmas has come early as we're getting a sneak peak at the toys under the tree. So we've got an interesting line up of new products to cover over the next month, some of which you may already have heard about. However here's an easy one to start with, the "EXP5060" or "1818-G1A" in IBM terms.

For the past couple of years the DS4000 and DS5000 series of storage has only had the one expansion enclosure to choose from, the EXP810 or the EXP520 respectively. Sixteen disks up front, power and connectivity in the back, 3U in height, and a selection of SATA and FC disks in various sizes. However there's now an additional option for disk expansion, the EXP5060.

According to the below report AIX on POWER is still statistically the best OS for maximum uptime. I think that the comparison of the UNIX based operating systems are fair as these servers are likely to be doing similar jobs. The Windows results however are heavily skewed by the number of security patches that have had to be applied to the frontline servers. Is this a measure of the OS or a reflection on the position of the servers in the application stack/network layer?

http://windowsitpro.com/article/articleid/98475/windows-server-the-new-king-of-downtime.html

I would be really interested in a report that compared similar applications (e.g. ERP or database systems) running on AIX, HP-UX, Solaris and windows. 
Relative performance comparisons and benchmarking different systems is something that can be done in a finite amount of time with a lab full of kit. But uptime comparisons rely on surveys and user reports over an extended period of time, and never seem to be from well grouped application categories. If anyone has seen better stats that make more detailed comparison of OS uptime please let me know.

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