Re: i5 Youngsters

Walden H. Leverich wrote:

Rochester has a whole bunch dedicated to this task.

Left-hand watching right-hand, but fair enough. I should have

said, "How many NON-IBM people are actively..."

Very hard to say. Considering the homes of many AS/400, iSeries and
System i systems -- banks, casinos, etc. -- there is some
expectation that there are some very highly interested and extremely
capable outsiders probing 24/7.

Tom Liotta
--
Tom Liotta
The PowerTech Group, Inc.
19426 68th Avenue South
Kent, WA 98032
Phone 253-872-7788 x313
253-479-1416
Fax 253-872-7904
http://www.powertech.com

Tom works for a security company so I think his opinions carry some
weight.

To think the System i is inherently insecure and just not noticed would be
naive. Granted, it's not as popular as some other platforms and so won't
get the same quanitity of attention. But with the kind of information
housed on a System i, there's plenty of motivation. Lookup and read
information on IBM's Deep Blue Security project. I know that about 10
years ago IBM (Rochester specifically) hired and contracted with a whole
bunch of folks to poke at a properly configured AS/400--they *all* failed.
It's believed that former KGB were included in the list of those who
tried but couldn't break into the system. IBM would have hosted a hacker
challenge, offering a boatload of cash. But some of their largest
customers balked at the idea of drawing attention to the system so the
challenge was canceled. But don't think IBM quit working on the security
of the system.

from: "Lukas Beeler" <lukas.beeler@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
subject: Re: i5 Youngsters

On 1/15/08, Jones, John (US) <John.Jones@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

drive up adapter expense some, but they can engineer bridge chips

easily

enough to adapt PCI-E cards to PCI-X. That said, POWER6 systems have
both PCI-E and Infiniband in addition to PCI-X. See section 2.1.2 of
RedBook 5052.

Yes, i know. But there are no POWER6 based smaller machines.

Not yet. We're all waiting to see what IBM releases as we move toward and
into spring.

having? It's exceedingly rare for most shops to have to do that.

Also,

the OS is huge and includes the database and all of the other bits we
love so PTFs cover a lot of territory.

They do. And the only thing about PTFs that i really hate is that you
can't automate them. (which would be really beneficial for very small
shops that only get help if somethings broken).

By "can't automate them" do you mean something akin to "Automatic
Updates"? That's an interesting idea. I know that smaller shops can't
afford someone dedicated to a PTF review/order/load/apply process. In our
shop, we have one person handle all the systenm and network
administration. In his spare time, he has automated much of the PTF
process. Perhaps a security vendor could develop a package to do just
that.

The fastest POWER5+ CPUs are 2.2 Ghz and dual core. They're way behind
Intel's current offerings.

There's more to CPU performance than speed. If Intel's offerings are so
advanced, why aren't the top super computers built on Intel offerings? IBM
has produced almost half of the top 500 super-computers. See
http://www.top500.org