News Briefs - Software:

DB2 Universal Database Certified On Line Of SGI Altix Servers

Silicon Graphics announced that IBM DB2 Universal Database is now fully certified for use with the SGI Altix family of servers running SUSE LINUX Enterprise Server. Customers can purchase DB2 Universal Database software for Altix systems directly from IBM and run it on SGI Altix, one of the world's most powerful and scalable systems based on the Intel Itanium 2 processor and the Linux operating system.

Users of SGI Altix systems comprise the industry's most prolific producers and consumers of big data, and databases underlie many of their key solutions. With DB2 Universal Database certified for use with Altix systems, SGI ensures its customers immediate and complete support for this critical infrastructure technology.

"From homeland security and defense research to life sciences and oil exploration, our customers care about one thing: turning larger and larger amounts of data into useful knowledge in ever-shrinking amounts of time," said Jeffrey Greenwald, senior director, server product management and marketing, SGI. "The powerful combination of DB2 Universal Database running on Altix will give those customers the performance, scalability, and reliability they require to address that need with their technical database applications."

"IBM is committed to working with Business Partners to take advantage of DB2 Universal Database to meet customers' growing information management requirements," said Gary Schneider, director, Linux business development, IBM DB2 Information Management Solutions. "The combination of SGI's Altix family and DB2 for Linux provides enterprise-class customers with an easy to use, reliable and scalable data center to power their most demanding technical, scientific and creative applications."

Altix Server Family Scales Out and Scales Up

The SGI Altix family offers unparalleled options for scaling up and scaling out to meet users' database needs. The mid-range SGI Altix 350 scales from one to 16 Itanium 2 processors and up to 192GB of memory per node. Hundreds of nodes can be clustered together over standard gigabit Ethernet or the leading price-performance interconnect, InfiniBand from Voltaire. With best in class price, performance, and price/performance, Altix 350 is an ideal platform for a DB2 Universal Database.

SGI Altix 3000 is the first Linux OS-based system to commercially scale up to 256 Intel Itanium 2 processors in a single node using the powerful SGI NUMAflex global shared-memory architecture. Altix 3000 also offers the unique ability to scale memory, CPUs and I/O bandwidth independently of one another, so Altix systems can be configured to meet any challenge. Each node in a system can contain 4 to 256 processors, 4GB to 8TB of global shared memory, and 48 PCI-X buses; and delivers over 3GB per second of sustained I/O bandwidth.

Altix 3000 also excels at scaling out. With SGI's unique shared-memory supercluster capability, Altix can deliver data between nodes using direct shared memory access across NUMAlink, providing performance up to 200 times faster than conventional clustering interconnects. Moreover, the same physical system can be reconfigured from single node to a supercluster with no re- cabling, thus affording the ultimate in flexibility.

"Intel is very pleased with SGI's implementation of the Intel Itanium 2 processor technology," said Lisa Graff, director of the Itanium Group in Intel's Enterprise Platforms Group. "The Altix architecture does an exceptional job of exposing and enhancing the capabilities inherent in Itanium 2 processors. With its NUMAflex interconnect fabric and scalability, Altix brings true supercomputing to the open-source Linux community. The advantages of this approach are apparent than with technical databases, making certification of DB2 on Altix welcome news indeed."