Me too!

Looks like IBM is somewhat concerned about the Exabyte V2 announcement and that announcement that is like to happen on October 14th. At least there is a loud “We have it, too - kind of” from Armonk. They tout their product IBM DB2 Pure Scale. Power machines with AIX, some infiniband gearand special edition of DB2.

Some educated guesses

Mr. BlueToTheBone is right. Details are sparse at the moment. But just to write down some points, you remember for having a deeper look at after an official announcement. Those points are purely speculative given that the information in the ElReg article are really sparse:

• It will be interesting how this solution with a centralized lock management will compare with the distributed lock management in RAC. Perhaps this will be the scaleability stopper for the IBM solution. I think we will see a solution with fewer, but bigger nodes. Given that the job of lock management is consolidated on one node, i would say that the front end node will be a really big machine.
• But have the same opinion like Chris Mellor (hell freezes over, i have the same opinion): IBM has a storage problem. There was the 1 Million IOPS Quicksilver marketing stunt. But that system were just 40 Fusion-IO cards in a lot of servers. So that doesn't look like something playing in the same ballpark like the Sun F5100
  

  The QuickSilver flash was composed of one or two 250GB Fusion-io ioDrives with PCIe interfaces in 29 host servers connected by Fibre Channel to the 13 SVCs. There were 41 ioDrives in total.

  Just for the uninitated: The SVC (Storage SAN Volume Controller) is a server as well. A full rack of hardware for 1 Million IOPS. But perhaps they just plug the Fusion-IO in the database servers and don't use SVC at all... who knows
• The p6 pSeries systems doesn't have PCI Express 2.0. With the PCIe 1.0 variant you have 240 MBytes/s. Thus you have somewhat around 2 GByte/s on the x8 PCIe of a p520 for example. That isn't enough for QDR. Some systems like the 520 provide GX busses for better connectivity, but nevertheless there doesn't seem to be QDR cards supported in the systems. But those 520 are 4 RU systems, don't know if they use them for such a cluster. Thus i would expect to see DDR infiniband in those systems. I assume they will have half the bandwidth in the fabric
• There isn't a system in the pSeries lineup that allows to put 12 disks on 2 rack units. That's the other side of the storage problem, albeit Chis Mellor at El Reg doesn't mention it. That's the point why the X4275 is such an interesting system. You can have 12 Disks *and* 2 sockets on 2 rack units. I assume the database servers have seperate storage arrays.

There are some other points, but those are much deeper in the realm of speculation, so i just wait for the announcement for further comments.

Frankenbase

Some people say, that Exabyte V2 in its current incarnation is just rushed together in the light of the upcoming merger. But the stuff that IBM told exclusively in the ears of Bluetothebone sounds like kludged together just to counter an competitors announcement. I’m sure that IBM will show of a strange configuration, calling it DB2 Pure Scale. But Frankenstein creation will look as a beauty beside this solution. ;)