IBM Corp’s new RS/6000 Model F30, the first RS/6000 to be offered with Windows NT (from June) as well as AIX, is a PCI bus 133MHz PowerPC 604 uniprocessor server that comes in above the 100MHz E20. It can accommodate 512Mb memory now – a future 960Mb configuration is expected to perform 850 transactions per minute – up to 512Kb Level 2 cache, 40Gb disk, three PCI, three AT and four shared slots. It costs from $14,000, it shipped from March 1 and is rated at 4.74 SPECint95 and 3.49 SPECfp95. IBM’s other PCI bus RS/6000s are the 43P workstation, which runs AIX, NT (from April) or the desktop version of Solaris for PowerPC, 2.5.1X ($900 from March 1) and the former Power Series 820 and 850 Thinkpads (now folded into the RS/6000 line) which already run AIX and NT, and Solaris from March 1. OS/2 for PowerPC is a special order on the PowerPC RS/6000s. IBM is not saying when a server version of Solaris-for-PowerPC will see the light of day on an RS/6000, although it is certainly part of the long-term plan. Its existing agreement with SunSoft Inc extends only to Solaris on the desktop and Thinkpad Power Series systems and SunSoft has not had access to RS/6000 server technology. There is no technical reason it can’t happen, SunSoft says. Each told us to talk to the other about it, which we did, but each just referred us back again. Meantime, with the announcement coming the day after Motorola Inc’s licensing of Apple Computer Inc’s Mac OS for its PowerPC systems, RS/6000 assistant general manager Jeff Mason said it was entirely reasonable to assume that IBM would make Mac OS available on future RS/6000 desktops and servers that conform to the PowerPC Platform standard (formerly the Common Hardware Reference Platform specification), but it has no agreement yet, either with Apple or with Motorola. To boost the RS/6000’s attraction as a video server, IBM is offering new Multimedia Server software on AIX for distributing audio and video to Network File System and TCP/IP-based clients over Ethernet, Token Ring or FDDI. It is up on the PCI bus E20 and 59H and G30 Micro Channel Architecture servers. It will integrate Java into a future AIX release. The company is expected to move some middleware over to the other operating systems it supports on the RS/6000 over time. Michael Coleman’s personal computer server group – which last week stood up and supported the Hewlett-Packard Co-Santa Cruz Operation Inc Summit Unix project (CI No 2,855, 2,856) – has bitten the bullet and has licensed Sun Microsystems Inc’s Solaris x86 Internet bundle – the operating system, SunSoft Inc’s Internet gateway and Netscape Communications Corp’s Commerce server – which is one of three packaged Internet options its offering bundled with a personal computer Server 320. The SunSoft offering is from $8,900; OS/2 and Windows NT packages are both priced at from $7,970. SunSoft will make the Internet technologies available for PowerPC later this year. The PC Server group also renamed its NetInfinity local network management software PC SystemView 4.0; it costs $450.
