Re: Information on Enterprise Identity Mapping (EIM)?

Pat Barber wrote:

> They might do away with the term "IOP" but they will never do
> away with seperate intelligent processor(s) handling disk I/O.
>
> That's one of the "major" differences in the 400 vs
> everything else....

Pat, the following excerpt is from an article Frank Soltis wrote for iSeries
Network, entitled "The Making of an IBM Software Powerhouse:

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Lest you believe that only the processor hardware is converging, we are also
working to converge the I/O hardware on these three platforms. It is a
well-known fact that today there is a difference between the I/O of the
iSeries and the I/O of the pSeries. The iSeries uses I/O processors (IOPs);
the pSeries does not. This too will change as we move to an I/O architecture
that no longer requires IOPs.

The new I/O architecture, called InfiniBand, will (over the next couple of
years) replace the current Peripheral Component Interface (PCI) bus
architecture used in today's eServers. Because InfiniBand is a channel with
far more built-in intelligence than a PCI bus has, there will no longer be a
need for IOPs to provide that level of intelligence. As a result, common I/O
will exist across all eServers, including the zSeries and the xSeries.

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Never say never.... <g>


Regards,

John Taylor