itjungle: Bye Bye System p and i, Hello Power Systems

Bye bye Systems pi? Here are some snippets from

http://www.itjungle.com/tfh/tfh031708-story01.html


<snip> A rebranding of the merged System i and System p product lines,
perhaps to a single Power Systems brand, would seem to make sense. And
given how attached those of us in the midrange can be about exploiting
and pushing brands like AS/400, iSeries, and System i, what better place
to take on the issue than at a town hall meeting with the OS/400 and
i5/OS faithful? It gets easier once that meeting is over, for sure.

If IBM does create a converged brand, it will of course only mirror the
merging of technologies that has been under way since 1995. If you
remember, 1995 was when it became clear that the neither IBM's Austin,
Texas, RS/6000 development labs nor its PowerPC chip partner, Motorola
<http://www.motorola.com> , were going to get their PowerPC 620 and 630
processors out the door and IBM hung its future on the "Star" family of
64-bit PowerPC AS c\\

<snip> IBM is not the only system vendor that is converging products
and converging brands, and it is not the only one to have done it in a
stop-and-go, sometimes jarring fashion that annoys customers.

<snip>
Mainframe and high-end Windows server maker Unisys
<http://www.unisys.com> was on a path to converge its ClearPath
mainframe line
<snip> Two years ago, Unisys looked at the cost of that convergence and
its own research and development costs to fully converge its products
and then suddenly decided that the better idea was to create a joint
Itanium-Xeon server product line with Japanese server maker NEC
<http://www.nec.com> .

<snip > Hewlett-Packard <http://www.hp.com> has also wrestled with
server convergence and branding issues, after having inherited DEC
AlphaServer, Compaq ProLiant, and Tandem NonStop product lines through
its acquisition of Compaq in 2001. HP's plan followed that already
underway at Compaq, which was to converge its operating
systems--OpenVMS, NonStop, and Tru64 Unix--onto a single Itanium-based
platform. HP was itself moving its HP-UX Unix to Itanium at the time of
the merger,

</snip>