19 Apr Medical College of Wisconsin enhances research with IBM Blade server
MILWAUKEE – The Medical College of Wisconsin has implemented IBM’s eServer BladeCenter JS20 as the heart of the new computing infrastructure support system for proteomics research. IBM announced last month the BladeCenter JS20 – the industry’s first blade system based on Power Architecture – will begin shipping in volume globally in April 2004. The MCW is the initial customer site to test the Sequest application on the JS20 running SUSE LINUX. Sequest is an application specifically for use in protein research, and is designed to enable the MCW to expand their research in developing innovative new techniques to improve proteomics.
“We’ve used a variety of hardware systems in the past, but we’re looking to push the limits of proteomics research and we needed a technology platform that could keep up, and IBM and the BladeCenter family was the way to go,” said Andrew Greene, professor and director of the MCW’s Biotechnology and Biomedical Engineering Center. “With the IBM eServer BladeCenter JS20 being based on the Power Architecture and IBM’s commitment to the POWER roadmap, we think that we will have a great future with this platform.”
IBM’s Power Architecture technology is designed to offer customers open technology solutions using either the AIX 5L, OS/400 or Linux operating systems that complement 64-bit applications.
The BladeCenter JS20 extends blade technology to 64-bit computing, offering customers the choice of either POWER processor-based or Intel Xeon processor-based systems. The system supports both SUSE LINUX and Turbolinux, with additional support for Red Hat expected in the second quarter of 2004. In the coming months, the AIX 5L operating system will be supported as well. The JS20 utilizes the PowerP 970 processor, a processor derived from the same Power Architecture currently used in IBM eServer pSeries and iSeries systems that support UNIX, Linux and OS/400 applications.
According to IDC, blade technology is the world’s fastest growing server market segment based on server revenue, growing nearly 550 percent in 2003. IDC estimates that blade systems will account for one of every four servers by 2007. Since announcing blade servers in December 2002, IBM has shipped more than 60,000 blade servers.
“We are pleased with the IBM blades because we have had a good experience working with IBM,” Greene said. “They are very committed to research and highly motivated to meet our timeline. We selected the blades because we felt it was a scalable technology platform with a good performance/price point. Another important reason for selecting the blades was the plan of several key software vendors to make programs available on that platform.”
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Kristin V. Johnson is a Madison-based writer. She can be reached at kristin@wistechnology.com.