Power 550 servers

I'm just coming up for air, having missed the bulk of the spring
announcements for Power servers, V6R1, and the latest confusing name for
whatever it is we're running these days. I've searched the archives a
bit. I apologize if this has been discussed.

Recently I stumbled across this on the IBM page for the Power 550
Express Server:
_________
Processor cores: Two, four, six or eight(1) 64-bit 3.5 GHz or 4.2
GHz POWER6 with AltiVec(tm) SIMD and Hardware Decimal Floating-Point
acceleration

(in the footnotes:)
(1) Available configuration options are dependent on the number of
processor cores, processor speed and other factors. The IBM i operating
system is supported on 2- and 4-core configurations only.
_________

Whaddya think? Is there a technical reason, or is IBM deliberately
marketing the i out of the 8-core Power 550 servers?

We've been buying Power 5+ 550's for the past year or so for our pSeries
servers. The 550Q was a sweet spot in the lineup -- a nicely priced,
solid 8-core midrange machine positioned right below the 570 enterpri$e
class machines. It also filled a niche that HP took way too long to
fill. After years of running Unix it was starting to look real good --
we could drop in a serious workhorse of a server without paying a small
fortune for an enterprise box and enterprise OS and support costs.

The other proprietary Unixes have caught up. And now there are some
killer Intel boxes in this niche for Linux.

In the new Power servers it looks like i customers have to jump to a 570
if their workload extends beyond four cores, unless I'm missing
something fundamental. Is it me, or is IBM cutting the i customers out
of the <ahem> "mid range" of the Power servers?

-Jim

James P. Damato
Sr. Manager - System Administration
Dollar General Corporation
mailto:jdamato@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx