IBM ports Blue Hammer to Linux and Unix

IBM is porting its supercomputing software, dubbed Blue Hammer, to Linux and Unix to help manage large server farms from a single workstation.

Blue Hammer integrates a company's IT infrastructure from web servers to large systems running back-end workloads, such as enterprise resource planning and customer relationship management applications.

The eServer clusters for Unix and Linux broaden the system management software and massive file system of IBM's SP supercomputer to the market for rack-mounted servers, the company said.

Dave Turek, vice president of Big Blue's web servers unit, said the announcement illustrates the importance of clustering to the company. "Clustering technologies across a broader set of operating systems and platforms give customers the scalability and affordability they are looking for today," he said.

The new software, which will cluster up to 32 two-way to eight-way IBM M80 servers or 32 one-way to six-way IBM H80 servers on the AIX operating system, will be available next month. The Linux version, which will provide management for clusters of up to 32 two-way IBM eServer Intel-based machines, will be available in May.

Both versions will include the supercomputer's Parallel System Support Programs (PSSP) cluster management software and General Parallel File System (GPFS) software.

IBM plans to further migrate the same clustering technology to its z900 series of mainframes sometime in the first half of this year.

Stacey Quandt, an analyst at Giga Information Group, said: "Since 70 per cent of SP technology ends up in commercial accounts, the addition of PSSP and GPFS means IT administrators, and administrators running Linux systems with a high degree of parallelism, will benefit from application specific failover and support for large data access for data mining at a lower cost than available under Unix systems."

"This is still a scale out rather than a scale up scenario for Linux and will benefit market segments such as life sciences and companies focused on bioinformatics or business intelligence," she added.