02/14/2007

IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced that it is teaming with AMD and Novell to create an integrated Linux offering built around IBM’s next generation Informix Dynamic Server (IDS) data server, code-named “Cheetah.” IBM also revealed that Cheetah has now entered an open beta testing for customers and business partners.

ebizQ received the following details:

The new Linux offering will combine IDS Cheetah, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server from Novell and IBM xSeries 3105 highly-scalable servers powered by second-generation AMD Opteron 1000 Series processors to provide new availability and security features in a low cost solution to help small and medium businesses (SMBs) meet their critical needs.

“The IDS data server provides an environment with low administration needs, which in turn lowers the total cost of ownership and frees up DBAs to focus more attention on their overall Information on Demand strategy,” said Arvind Krishna, vice president IBM data servers. “IDS Cheetah will build upon the IDS history of reliability with a broad spectrum of high-availability options for business continuity and advanced security. Information has become a strategic asset for companies, IDS allows companies to truly leverage information.”

Scheduled for release in 2007, IDS Cheetah is designed to offer new capabilities to help customers meet their changing data management goals by enabling users to extract more value from their business information.

“Data is at the heart of every business, and being able to access it efficiently and reliably is paramount to success,” said Terri Hall, vice president, Commercial Solutions and Alliances, AMD. “The combination of IDS Cheetah and the xSeries 3105 powered by AMD Opteron processors with Direct Connect Architecture will provide customers with a cost-effective, high-availability solution to meet their critical data management requirements.”

Cheetah features significant enhancements to application development that are aimed at helping customers accelerate time-to-value for new applications and in porting existing applications to IDS. Cheetah also will offer extended support for applications collaboration and integration for Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). Also included in the new version will be enhanced support for hierarchical data structures, built-in flexible text searches unstructured documents and enhanced support for datatypes support for distributed queries across multiple IDS instances.

”IDS Cheetah’s support for open source applications development combined with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server’s high performance and reliability will allow us to deliver to customers a solution to maximize their application investments and to benefit from the vast application resources available,” said Roger Levy, Novell vice president and general manager of Open Platform Solutions.

Early Cheetah customers include ProSiebenSat.1 Produktion, the technology competence center of Germany’s largest private television company the ProSiebenSat.1 Group, who plan to utilize the next-generation IDS data server to help manage their comprehensive range of TV, mobile and multimedia production services. With the IDS software simplifying and automating many database management tasks, the company is able to employ only three database administrators.

"As a participant of the ‘Cheetah’ closed beta program, we are impressed with the new capabilities that IDS will offer,” said Markus Holzbauer, senior database administrator for ProSiebenSat.1 Produktion. “Specially, the high reliability and superb transaction throughput really appealed to us. With the development of ‘Cheetah’, IBM makes it clear that IDS continues to be a key strategic product in its portfolio."

IDS is a strategic element of IBM’s Information Management software portfolio and delivers exceptionally fast OLTP performance, high reliability and low cost administration. IDS is a leading integrated data server in many market segments such as retail, telecommunications, healthcare, government, banking/finance, entertainment, and SMB. IDS also delivers a broad spectrum of high availability features to ensure business continuity for customers from SMB businesses to global enterprises. The continued popularity and use of IDS is illustrated by the fact that in North America alone, eight of the top ten retailers and twenty of the top twenty-five supermarkets use IDS.

The new IDS Cheetah Linux bundle is expected to be available through the ValueNet business partner program beginning in 2007. Specific terms on the program are being worked out and will be announced at product launch.

Customers, developers and partners can find out more about IDS at http://www.ibm.com/software/data/informix/ids/new