IBM Corp is spending $47m on hardware at two Teraplex Centers to demonstrate its data warehousing capabilities. One is at Poughkeepsie, New York with S/390 and RS/6000 systems and the largest AS/400 in the world, is based at Rochester, Minnesota. The S/390 center contains four 10-way S/390 servers with coupling and more than 3Tb Ramac 2 disk storage, running DB2 for MVS. The RS/6000 system contains 32 eight-way nodes with 4Tb Serial Storage Architecture disk storage running DB2/6000 and Informix, Oracle, Sybase and Red Brick databases among others. The AS/400 is a 32-way beast comprising eight four-ways with 4Tb of disk storage running DB/400. Ben Barnes, IBM’s general manager of worldwide decision support systems, emphasized that although IBM was running TPC-D decision support software they are not benchmarking centers, merely places to demonstrate and teach how to tune, manage and back-up data warehouses. IBM will use its Intelligent Miner data mining software at the centers, which is now generally available. The Poughkeepsie center is up and running now, the Rochester one will follow within 40 days.
