The pSeries 630 server, dubbed the Regatta-LE inside IBM, was announced in June 2002. The machine comes in one-way, two-way, and four-way configurations and is based on the same dual-core Power4 processors that IBM announced in October 2001 in the 32-way pSeries 690 Regatta-H servers and in April 2002 in the 16-way Regatta-M pSeries 670 servers. (The pSeries 670 has been largely overrun by the pSeries 650, but has been reborn in the iSeries line as the new Model 870 in the product line.) The pSeries 630 comes in two flavors, with both machines using a 1GHz version of the Power4 processor. The pSeries 630-6E4 is the tower version of this machine; it supports a maximum of two logical partitions and it is not NEBS compliant. The pSeries 630-6C4 is a rack-mounted version that fits into a 4U form factor that supports two logical partitions in a normal configuration and up to four logical partitions when an optional auxiliary I/O drawer is attached to the machine. The pSeries 630 currently supports from 1GB to 16GB of DDR chipkill main memory and up to 297GB of disk capacity.

This machine supports AIX 5L 5.1 and 5.2 as well as the 64-bit version of Linux for PowerPC-Power chips, and it was the first machine that IBM made its Linux Ready Express Configurations available on. These configurations cut the price of a pSeries 630 configuration by between 8% and 27% off list price because AIX is removed and IBM wants to chop prices to compete against Lintel iron, especially Itanium machines from Hewlett Packard Co.

Exactly what IBM plans to do with the pSeries630+ kickers is unclear, but it doesn’t make much sense to just move from a 1GHz Power4 to a 1.2GHz Power4+ when a 1.45GHz Power4 is available, and maybe even a faster processor as IBM gets better yields on the Power4+ chips. IBM could split the difference and just do a 1.3GHz Power4+ chip, which would be no faster in terms of clock speed than the original top-end Power4 processor, but it would have slightly larger on-chip caches that would boost performance on some workloads.

IBM will almost certainly double the main memory and disk capacity with the pSeries 630+, and it may even cut prices to keep the same amount of water between this machine and servers based on Xeon and Itanium processors from Intel Corp. IBM was planning on launching the pSeries 630+ in the third week of February, but may do it earlier or later to create more of a media splash, especially in light of next week’s server announcements from rival Sun Microsystems Inc.

In a separate development, IBM says that it has shipped 2,000 of the pSeries 650 machines since their debut in November over two months ago. This exceeds some of the expectations we had heard about. IBM was said to be concerned with the yields on the Power4+ chips running at 1.45GHz when the pSeries 650 was launched, and what IBM does with the pSeries 630 will be evidence as to whether that ramp is going well or not. Moreover, IBM will eventually need to move the Power4+ chips into the high-end pSeries 690 servers, something that no one is talking about yet but which is obviously on the horizon.

And, finally, so are the Linux Express configs of the pSeries 650s that IBM was promising last year. These are available starting Friday, with a starting base list price of $28,795.

Source: Computerwire