IBM To Buy Red Hat, the Top Linux Distributor, For $34 Billion (bloomberg.com) 398
International Business Machines (IBM) is acquiring software maker Red Hat in a deal valued at $34 billion, the companies said Sunday. From a report: The purchase, announced on Sunday afternoon, is the latest competitive step among large business software companies to gain an edge in the fast-growing market for Internet-style cloud computing. In June, Microsoft acquired GitHub, a major code-sharing platform for software developers, for $7.5 billion. IBM said its acquisition of Red Hat was a move to open up software development on computer clouds, in which software developers write applications that run on remote data centers. From a press release: This acquisition brings together the best-in-class hybrid cloud providers and will enable companies to securely move all business applications to the cloud. Companies today are already using multiple clouds. However, research shows that 80 percent of business workloads have yet to move to the cloud, held back by the proprietary nature of today's cloud market. This prevents portability of data and applications across multiple clouds, data security in a multi-cloud environment and consistent cloud management.
IBM and Red Hat will be strongly positioned to address this issue and accelerate hybrid multi-cloud adoption. Together, they will help clients create cloud-native business applications faster, drive greater portability and security of data and applications across multiple public and private clouds, all with consistent cloud management. In doing so, they will draw on their shared leadership in key technologies, such as Linux, containers, Kubernetes, multi-cloud management, and cloud management and automation. IBM's and Red Hat's partnership has spanned 20 years, with IBM serving as an early supporter of Linux, collaborating with Red Hat to help develop and grow enterprise-grade Linux and more recently to bring enterprise Kubernetes and hybrid cloud solutions to customers. These innovations have become core technologies within IBM's $19 billion hybrid cloud business. Between them, IBM and Red Hat have contributed more to the open source community than any other organization.
IBM and Red Hat will be strongly positioned to address this issue and accelerate hybrid multi-cloud adoption. Together, they will help clients create cloud-native business applications faster, drive greater portability and security of data and applications across multiple public and private clouds, all with consistent cloud management. In doing so, they will draw on their shared leadership in key technologies, such as Linux, containers, Kubernetes, multi-cloud management, and cloud management and automation. IBM's and Red Hat's partnership has spanned 20 years, with IBM serving as an early supporter of Linux, collaborating with Red Hat to help develop and grow enterprise-grade Linux and more recently to bring enterprise Kubernetes and hybrid cloud solutions to customers. These innovations have become core technologies within IBM's $19 billion hybrid cloud business. Between them, IBM and Red Hat have contributed more to the open source community than any other organization.
Damn. (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm going to have to switch to Ubuntu.
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Re:Damn. (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm going to have to switch to Ubuntu.
Why? Is there some specific IBM behavior you object to? If so, please explain it here.
If it’s just a dislike of corporate involvement with Linux... Red Hat was the wrong distro for you in the first place.
Re: Damn. (Score:5, Insightful)
IBM license fees are predatory. Plus they require you to install agents on your servers for the sole purpose of calculating use and licenses. IBM exploits workers by offshoring and are slow to fix bugs and critical CVEs (WAS and DB2 especially)
Re: Damn. (Score:2)
Not noticed that for either TSM or GPFS, or Spectrum Protect and Spectrum Scale as IBM like to call them these days.
Re: Damn. (Score:5, Informative)
IBM license fees are predatory.
I don't know about that, none of the open source IBM software I use has any license fees, predatory or otherwise. Some are GPL but I don't count that as predatory.
Dragon is a pretty nice OpenStack backup system I've been using in house for some time now.
Got it off github too
LLVM in the kernel is pretty amazing stuff for managing LVM, RAID, and other similar systems.
Far more stable than ZFS has ever managed to reach.
I've even played with their Watson speech-to-text stuff, which is a service offering not a software download, and even that is free as in doesn't cost money if you aren't going to be sending them a massive number of API requests every minute.
Plus they require you to install agents on your servers for the sole purpose of calculating use and licenses.
Simply not true, I've never had to do this. The closest "evil software" I've ever had to install to run some IBM software is Java, and that's Oracles fault not IBMs.
IBM exploits workers by offshoring and are slow to fix bugs and critical CVEs (WAS and DB2 especially)
So does RedHat, and many companies for that matter. If you are against off shoring, then nothing at all has changed here.
I can't comment on "WAS" or DB2 bugs, never used them. But I guess sure, RedHat fixes CVEs damn fast and is a high bar to stand up to.
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IBM is a services company. Has been for a long time now. They're not about software sales.
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Some of those patents are, well, not as sound as a lot of tech people would prefer.
Novell is not SCO (Score:3)
The UNIX code belonged to Novell not to SCO. SCO had nothing else than hot air and bluff. Or so the courts decided without consulting you.
Re:Damn. (Score:4, Insightful)
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My advice to Red Hat engineers is to get out now. I was an engineer at a company that was acquired by IBM. I was fairly senior so I stayed on and ended up retiring from the IBM, even though I hated my last few years working there. I worked for several companies during my career, from startups to fortune 100 companies. IBM was the worst place I worked by far. Consider every bad thing you've ever heard about IBM. I've heard those things too, and the reality was much worse.
IBM hasn't improved their Linux contr
Re:Damn. (Score:5, Informative)
If so, please explain it here.
IBM Rational DOORS: Starting at $5,460.00 USD
IBM Rational DOORS Next Generation: Starting at $164.00 USD per user per month
And that's pricing I can find. I don't even want to know what we're paying for IBM ClearCase.
IBM buys companies (Like Rational) and milks by exorbitant fees. They're only slightly 'better' than Oracle.
I expect anyone that doesn't have an IBM RedHat Certification(tm) won't have the 'full warranty'. Here let us direct you to one of our training centers.
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Or switch to suze
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I'm going to have to switch to Ubuntu.
Since Red Hat has only ever been good as a server operating system (and it ceased being good at that around Redhat 5), I recommend going straight to the mother of operating systems: Debian.
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Re: Damn. (Score:4, Informative)
Debian is not a public company. They are a community of developers, authors, artists, etc. There are not an entity in the business sense to be acquired. Debian will be one of the last distros left that is not commercialized. Slackware is another. Perhaps Arch and Gentoo.
I've been giving thought to switching over to OpenBSD and NetBSD for my personal needs, as Linux is really balkanized these days. systemd and the new CoC are really icing on the cake for my decision.
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Better Microsoft than IBM. Funny how things end up
Not sure about that. I suspect MS bought github as a way to migrate those developers over to Visual Studio Online.
A Cloudy argument. (Score:5, Interesting)
IBM said its acquisition of Red Hat was a move to open up software development on computer clouds, in which software developers write applications that run on remote data centers.
It's all open source. What's stopping them from developing to the Cloud, NOW?
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Re:A Cloudy argument. (Score:5, Insightful)
So you are saying that IBM has been asleep at the wheel for the last 8 years. Buying Red Hat won't save them, IBM is IBM's enemy.
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They're already one of the large cloud providers, but you don't know that because they only focus on big customers.
Re:A Cloudy argument. (Score:5, Insightful)
systemd (Score:4, Funny)
The next version will be branded IBM(R) SystemD/2.
They’ll be rebranding the distro (Score:5, Funny)
Henceforth, it’ll be known as “Big Blue Hat”.
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You joke... but...
I could honestly see Trump reading a headline "IBM rebrands Red Hat to Blue Wave" and going bat-shit over it
All Redhat employees over 50 to be fired! (Score:4, Funny)
IBM hates the olds! All People aged 50+ will be fired and replaced with coders fresh out of blockchain bootcamps! Also, all operations will be moved to a shanty town in India, those not willing to take a pay cut and relocate will be replaced with Indians.
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How long till IBM ships Poettering to India? weeks/months? Can we buy futures based on his declining health? This is great news.
Goodbye Redhat. (Score:5, Insightful)
possible outcomes (Score:3, Funny)
Who still uses Red Hat?!?? (Score:2)
Oh, wait, /. is a US joint. Ok, forget about what I said.
And now attention: ... :-)
Getting modded into earths core in 3,2,1
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Clearly you are not employed in tech; otherwise you wouldn't ask such a dopey question.
Re:Who still uses Red Hat?!?? (Score:4, Interesting)
Oh, wait, /. is a US joint. Ok, forget about what I said.
And now attention: ... :-)
Getting modded into earths core in 3,2,1
Virtually anyone running an actual production system.
I hope IBM keeps them pretty separate. One of the reasons RHEL is so successful is they've done a good job of maintaining a good relationship with the hobbyist crowd. They're not as cool as Ubuntu but they have a lot of fans in the community, both devs and users, and that helps them get into the server rooms.
Probably Red Hat's biggest liability has been their size, the more Free Software aligned crowd is very nervous about big corporations. If they ever start losing the community some other distro is going to start popping up in the server room.
Cha-Ching (Score:3)
AIX Redux (Score:5, Interesting)
Oh, good. Now IBM can turn RH into AIX while simultaneously suffocating whatever will be left of Redhat's staff with IBM's crushing, indifferent, incompetent bureaucracy.
This is what we call a lose - lose situation. Well, except for the president of Redhat, of course. Jim Whitehurst just got rich.
Re:AIX Redux (Score:5, Insightful)
Redhat is damn near AIX already. AIX had binary log files long before systemd.
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Redhat is damn near AIX already [...]
Yes, but now they also get IBM's crushing, indifferent, incompetent bureaucracy.
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Worse than Redhat's crushing, indifferent, incompetent bureaucracy? Maybe, but it's close.
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Worse than Redhat's crushing, indifferent, incompetent bureaucracy? Maybe, but it's close.
I used to be a Redhat dev, pre IPO, and I worked with IBM for about 15 years With, not for. Trust me: IBM has top honors here re: crushing, indifferent, incompetent bureaucracies.
How many companies has IBM destroyed or let die? (Score:2)
RH/2 Warp 3.0! (Score:2)
Now with Presentation Manager!
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But can nuns run it?
Now watch (Score:5, Interesting)
Microsoft will next merge with IBM.
Think about it. Makes sense. Microsoft couldn't purchase Redhat directly, that would make too many people upset.
But if IBM purchases Redhat, then Microsoft purchases IBM, they get Redhat by proxy. Then they have what they want - direct control over one of the most important Linux distros in the world. That, along with Github, gives them a pretty strong position in the F/OSS ecosystem.
Why all the hate? (Score:2)
Re:Why all the hate? (Score:4, Insightful)
They were top notch you mean. Current IBM management only knows about acquiring companies and outsourcing development work.
IBM will own Gnome and systemd (Score:2)
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
The end of Redhat's anti-patent stance (Score:5, Interesting)
So much for Redhat's fight against software patents, IBM is the biggest patent troll of them all. Traditionally goes easy on open source projects but some flipping idiot might decide at any time that monetizing patents is the new get rich quick scheme of the month.
Super! (Score:2)
Now maybe I'll be able to run Domino in 64 bit on Linux without IBM hardware.
Bad things come in threes (Score:2, Interesting)
First systemd.
Then a CoC.
Now Borged by IBM.
They'll probably be ok for a few years. Watch for the rebranding. When they start calling it IBM Enterprise Linux, you'll know they've been throughly assimilated. Then after about five years of steady market decline, it'll just quietly disappear.
Gee (Score:3, Funny)
IBM is mixed (Score:3)
They contributed JFS and ported DB/2. They ported Linux to their mainframes and ran the first Linux TV ads. During a superbowl, I think.
On the other hand, their maintenance of these projects, other than their mainframe, has been limited.
Breaking News! (Score:5, Funny)
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If IBM didn't screw things up (Score:2)
> I can see it being in IBM's best interests to keep the RedHat model alive, maintaining a first class distribution and selling support to fund it.
Well yes, it would be in IBM's best interest to not destroy companies they buy. If they weren't stupid, they wouldn't do that.
Unfortunately history shows IBM does wreck companies that they buy.
Re:Please God No (Score:5, Informative)
The core CentOS leadership are now Red Hat employees. They're not clear of nor uninvolved in this purchase.
Re:Please God No (Score:5, Insightful)
However, some will inevitably get sick of working at IBM or end up being laid off at some point. If these people want to keep doing what they're doing, they can start a new company. If they're good at what they do, they probably won't have much trouble attracting some venture capital either.
Re:Please God No (Score:5, Insightful)
"A lot of people are going to want the stable paycheck of working for IBM instead of trying to start a new company. "
Errrrmmm....I see you haven't been getting the memos. IBM has been bleeding their U.S. personal as fast as they can. Red Hatters would do well to eyeball their exit strategies.
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They are already signed by the staff, if any. Otherwise it would be contingent on employment, "sign this or you we walk you off of the property". That is what "at will" employment means. But no, Americans are too stupid to unionize.
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Re: Please God No (Score:5, Informative)
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Stock, interest, profit, and intellectual property are completely different concepts. That you conflate them all tells me all I need to know about your opinion. Hell, profit is just a math operation.
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Stock is simply a form of ownership. I guess we could abolish joint ownership and just let wealthy families control everything like the good 'ol days. The part you hate about it (people making money by trading) is a feature, not a flaw. It's a system where human nature works for the common good. Yes, you have people playing the market, but in exchange for that behavior that you don't like, you get the much greater good of liquidity and access to vast amounts of capital. I can be a part-owner of any company
Re:Please God No (Score:5, Funny)
Look on the bright side: Poettering works for Red Hat. (Reposting because apparently Poettering has mod points.)
Re:I don't get this (Score:5, Insightful)
I think it's more for Red Hat's cloud infrastructure, than the Linux distro itself.
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IBM and Red Hat will be strongly positioned to address this issue and accelerate hybrid multi-cloud adoption.
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I'm not sure how much legs the whole 'hybrid multi-cloud' actually has. Our company looked at the RedHat platform and decided to jump to straight cloud. We'll be running some small IAAS software on-prem for a brief period while we transition. We'll see how much lock-in they can get for the customers that do buy into it.
Re: IBM Linux is the best Linux (Score:2)
Keep up at the back there, it will be Spectrum Linux. With a bit a luck I might not need separate licenses for my Spectrum Protect (nee TSM) servers in the future. Though oddly Spectrum Protect for Virtual Enviroments seems to be a SuSE based VM.
Re: It all (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: It all (Score:5, Funny)
Nuh uh, look at the market share of OS/2 and AIX. /s
Re: It all (Score:5, Informative)
Lennart already fucked up RHEL, I hope IBM will get rid of him and systemd.
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+1
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Lennart already fucked up RHEL
In what way? Show me your evidence that systemd has in any way affected RHEL's marketshare that didn't drive it to a competitor that also uses systemd.
The way I see it, the only people who actually think he fucked up RHEL are ACs and about 10 vocal slashdot users.
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So, sadly, I"M guessing IBM will acquire and fuck up RHEL
Uhm, Gnome3, systemd, NetworkManager? Or, have you seen people try to upgrade Red Hat boxes? The only way for RHEL is up.
Re: It all (Score:4, Insightful)
Indeed. Maybe they will even sack Poettering. If so, they will do a ton of good.
Re: It all (Score:5, Insightful)
Indeed. Maybe they will even sack Poettering. If so, they will do a ton of good.
Surely you jest. Knowing IBM, as I do, they're more likely to make Poettering the head of the division.
Lol (Score:2, Flamebait)
With systemd how can they fuck it up worse than it already is?
Re:Lol (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, it *is* IBM....I'm sure they can still make it worse.
The only company I know that ruins software they acquire worse than IBM, is CA.....it may survive IBM, but if CA buys them, it is an instant mark of death for the software.
Re:Lol (Score:5, Informative)
You forgot Oracle.
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Well, it *is* IBM....I'm sure they can still make it worse.
The only company I know that ruins software they acquire worse than IBM, is CA.....it may survive IBM, but if CA buys them, it is an instant mark of death for the software.
Symantec. It's where good software goes to die.
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Merge SystemD with traditional AIX management tools with binary configuration database?
Re: It all (Score:5, Insightful)
So, sadly, I"M guessing IBM will acquire and fuck up RHEL
I think the more accurate term is 'ramp up' not 'fuck up' - more and more Open Source is about vendor on-ramps [infoworld.com].
Re: It all (Score:5, Interesting)
My feelings exactly. As a former employee for both places, I see this as the death knell for Red Hat. Not immediately, not quickly, but eventually Red Hat's going to go the same way as every other company IBM has acquired.
Red Hat's doom (again, all IMO) started about 10 years ago or so when Matt Szulik left and Jim Whitehurst came on board. Nothing against Jim, but he NEVER seemed to grasp what F/OSS was about. Hell, when he came onboard he wouldn't (and never did) use Linux at all: instead he used a Mac, and so did the rest of the EMT (executive management team) over time. What company is run by people who refuse to use its own product except for one that doesn't have faith. The person on top of the BRAND AND PEOPLE team "needed" an iPad, she said, to do her work (quoting a friend in the IT dept who was asked to get it and set it up for her).
Then when they (the EMTs) wanted to move away from using F/OSS internally to outsourcing huge aspects of our infrastructure (like no longer using F/OSS for email and instead contracting with GOOGLE to do our email, calendaring and document sharing) is when, again for me, the plane started to spiral. How can we sell to OUR CUSTOMERS the idea that "Red Hat and F/OSS will suit all of your corporate needs" when, again, the people running the ship didn't think it would work for OURS? We had no special email or calendar needs, and if we did WE WERE THE LEADERS OF OPEN SOURCE, couldn't we make it do what we want? Hell, I was on an internal (but on our own time) team whose goal was to take needs like this and incubate them with an open source solution to meet that need.
But the EMTs just didn't want to do that. They were too interested in what was "the big thing" (at the time Open Shift was where all of our hiring and resources were being poured) to pay attention to the foundations that were crumbling.
And now, here we are. Red Hat is being subsumed by the largest closed-source company on the planet, one who does their job sub-optimally (to be nice). This is the end of Red Hat as we know it. Without 5-7 years Red Hat will go the way of Tivoli and Lotus: it will be a brand name that lacks any of what made the original company what it was when it was acquired.
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Fedora is fully owned by Red Hat and CentOS requires the availability of the Red Hat repositories which they aren't obliged to make public to non-customers..
Re:Well at least we'll still have Cent (Score:5, Informative)
Fedora is fully owned by Red Hat and CentOS requires the availability of the Red Hat repositories which they aren't obliged to make public to non-customers..
Fedora is fully under Red Hat's control. It's used as a bleeding edge distro for hobbyists and as a testing ground for code before it goes into RHEL. I doubt its going away since it does a great job of establishing mindshare but no business in their right mind is going to run Fedora in production.
But CentOS started as a separate organization with a fairly adversarial relationship to Red Hat since it really is free RHEL which cuts into their actual customer base. They didn't need Red Hat repos back then, just the code which they rebuilt from scratch (which is why they were often a few months behind).
If IBM kills CentOS a new one will pop up in a week, that's the beauty of the GPL.
Re:Well at least we'll still have Cent (Score:5, Informative)
requires the availability of the Red Hat repositories which they aren't obliged to make public to non-customers
...and this is why Richard Stallman Calls Open Source Movement 'Amoral'. But RH must make the source publicly available under the GPL. [redhat.com]
Re:Well at least we'll still have Cent (Score:5, Interesting)
"... RH must make the source publicly available.."
That's not what the GPL says.
You only have to distribute the source code, or an offer to the source code to the recipient of the object code. It doesn't need to be public. RHEL's been good about making it public, especially since they do not publicly distribute the object code.
For CentOS to continue receiving the complete source code from IBM, they would need to subscribe to every single product that they republish the object code for.
This is not to say they couldn't get it from someone else who subscribed, but if IBM doesn't distribute RHEL in a similar omnibus form, it could be very difficult to set up reliable relationships with all the organizations which subscribe to every component of what is now RHEL.
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jfs was good, and so was SMIT, their software management tool. No GUI based admin system has ever come close to what they had in 1992 and 1993, from any vendor*...and every time RedHat got close, oh so close, they threw it all away in the next distro and started over. Repeatedly. This constant need for something new instead of actually improving what you have so far has been the killer to desktop linux more than 'apps' are. (yes, I understand much of that is the fact that the services and other features be
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The work I have seen from overseas, reviewing pull requests, have not borne that out. Usually the AMerican staff did the wrong thing and fixed it for the overseas staff.
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Nice try. OpenBSD is alive and well and is the premiere security research OS. OpenSSH, LibreSSL, pf and many others are all OpeBSD inventions and are used literally by billions of devices. Every router, every switch, every Linux distro, every BSD distro uses OpenSSH alone. Try again...
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Among some of my clients, I administer the UNIX infrastructure of a small Telecom operator. They have about 100 Linux Servers running RHEL, JBoss EAP, FreeIPA, CloudForms, Satellite, etc. This costs about €40k/year. The alternative from Oracle would have been €500k with their incredibly bad support.
I remember being excited when Oracle bought Sun. SUNW was running out of cash, but they had a spectacularly good software portfolio with ZFS, DTrace, Comstar, etc. It all went bust. Solaris hasn't seen
Re:Pay your licensing fee (Score:5, Interesting)
Footnote: $699 License Fee applies to your systemP server running RHEL 7 with 4 cores activated for one year. To activate additional processor cores on the systemP server, a fee of $199 per core applies. systemP offers a new Semi-Activation Mode now. In systemP Semi-Activation Mode, you will be only charged for all processor calls exceeding 258 MIPS, which will be processed by additional semi-activated cores on a pro-rata basis. RHEL on systemP servers also offers a Partial Activation Mode, where additional cores can be activated in Inhibited Efficiency Mode. To know more about Semi-Activation Mode, Partial Activation Mode and Inhibited Efficiency Mode, visit http://www.ibm.com/systemp [ibm.com] or contact your IBM systemP Sales Engineer.