France’s Bull SA and IBM Corp have yet again renewed their vows to work together developing high-end Unix servers. Bull and IBM have been cooperating on Unix development for the past seven years; Bull currently resells IBM’s RS/6000 Northstar and Pulsar servers under the Escala brand name in Europe. The company also works with IBM in making kernel extensions to AIX, in developing storage management programs for AIX and is one of IBM’s main Monterey/64 AIX-on-Itanium partners.
Under the new arrangement, which runs for the next five years, Bull and IBM have agreed to continue working on AIX feature to support multiple applications concurrently on RS/6000 and Escala servers, improve the Web-based management tools for those servers, tweak the code for better performance and to add more features to the OS and hardware to improve the reliability and availability of their respective Unix server lines.
Bull’s server division president, Didier Breton, says that the past IBM engineering cooperation deals have made it possible to grow market share in the high-end Unix market in Europe and he expects that the new agreements will help the company accelerate this growth.
