Timothy Prickett Morgan is reporting today at The Register that IBM is moving away from its proprietary CSM cluster tool, at least on Linux.
IBM tapped xCAT as its future clustering tool for HPC setups as part of this week’s Dynamic Infrastructure blitz, where the company made a number of storage, networking, and systems management announcements. Because there are loads of customers still using CSM on Power and x64 systems, IBM is giving them plenty of warning that CSM is going the way of all flesh.
…IBM added that while it was mothballing the Linux versions of CSM, it would continue to sell the AIX version of the tool for now and would keep it alive for the currently supported AIX 5.3 and 6.1 releases, including future hardware that comes out and supports those releases, such as the Power7 boxes due throughout 2010.
You may recall that CSM grew out of IBM’s PSSP (Parallel System Support Program) from back in the days when Blue’s supers were built out of RS/6000’s. We actually had to mid-sized RS/6000-based machines from IBM that ran PSSP back in the 1990s.
According to the story, IBM will stop selling the Linux versions of CSM on January 29, 2010, with support contracts going about another year.
