IDS Forum

Fw: IBM To Unleash The Next Informix IDS Release

Posted By: Peter_Logan@spartanstores.com
Date: Tuesday, 26 September 2006, at 1:22 p.m.

Here is additional info on the IDS future ...

----- Forwarded by Peter Logan/Corporate/Spartan on 09/26/2006 01:27 PM
-----

From:
Shakir Kamali/Corporate/Spartan
Recipients:
Peter Logan/Corporate/Spartan@SpartanStore
Subject:
IBM To Unleash The Next Informix IDS Release
Date:
09:42:29 AM Today

IBM To Unleash The Next Informix IDS Release

Code-named Cheetah, the new release is due to beta this spring and will
feature record-level locking and federal security certifications,
including Evaluation Assurance Levels 3 and 4.

By Barbara Darrow
CRN

Sep 25, 2006 12:01 AM
True to its word, IBM continues to update the Informix IDS database, a
cult favorite among some database VARs and customers.
The next release, code-named Cheetah, is due to beta this spring and will
feature record-level locking, technology carried over from the latest
release of IBM DB2, said Arvind Krishna, vice president of database
servers for IBM Software's Information Management Group, Somers, N.Y.
IBM is also making sure the new release will win federal security
certifications including the Evaulation Assurance Levels 3 and 4.
The current IDS Version 10 Release Change 5?IDS uses its own release
terminology?offers row-level and column-level locking. IDS has long been
known for its extensibility, its ability to run for long periods without
human intervention, and its ability to handle non-relational objectlike
data.
"IDS fits really well in that space where you don't need or can't have a
million DBAs. It can go into a DBA-less environment, often hub-and-spoke
environments used by branches and retail operations," Krishna told CRN.
One unnamed customer runs 4,000 physical locations and more than 10,000
instances of the current IDS release with just eight DBAs, he claimed. "If
you can show me an Oracle installation [doing that], I'll buy you the
bottle of wine of your choice," he said.
It is also able to pack a lot of database power into a relatively small
footprint and is more suited for such situations than IBM DB2. DB2 is
IBM's flagship database. Cheetah will also build on IDS' ability to handle
image data, cartographics, using and storing 3-D geometry.
IBM is slated to talk more about Cheetah at its Information OnDemand
Conference in Anaheim, Calif., next month. Beta is expected in March or
April, in time for IBM's annual PartnerWorld, he said.
IBM bought Informix and several database offerings five years ago. At the
time, there was concern that it made the acquisitions to buy the customer
lists but kill off the products. That has not happened, despite a lot of
"FUD spread by competitors," said Ron Flannery, president of One Point
Solutions, a Novi, Mich.-based IBM database partner.
Flannery said the reason IDS has retained a loyal customer base is the
technology's "rock-solid" performance and the fact that IBM has continued
to invest in it. "It never goes down and it's really fast," said Flannery,
who is also the author of a 1,400-page IDS handbook.
"IDS is very strong in reservation systems, retail and financial apps.
It's a great point-of-sale system because it never goes down once it's
installed and configured correctly," he noted. Its bulletproof status, in
fact, can hurt partners, he acknowledged. "Once we sell a package, do a
tune-up and check the configuration, we still monitor it but it requires
very little work."

Neil Truby, principal at Ardenta, a London-based IBM partner, concurs. "A
lot of the online gaming companies here rely on IDS and see no reason to
move away. IDS delivers very high throughput and availability," he noted.
The BBC and ITV television networks in the U.K. are also IDS users. "The
attraction for them is also the high availability and throughput and also
IDS' ability to help them deliver more and more content [and] image
documents," he said.
When IBM bought Informix for $1.0 billion in the spring of 2001, Informix
claimed 100,000 database customers, 35,000 of which were on IDS. Krishna
said that number sounds about right now given that IBM is in active
contact with 20,000 IDS customers.
Informix also fielded Red Brick for datamart applications and Cloudscape,
a Java database that IBM subsequently embedded into some of its own
products and open-sourced as Derby. IBM still offers Red Brick Warehouse
as well.
Still, IDS gets nowhere near the ink or attention of IBM's DB2 database
which, like IDS itself, runs on all the major operating systems. IBM
maintains that the IDS customer base may not be huge, but it is deep,
devoted and loyal, contentions both Truby and Flannery backed up.
Frank Cullen, principal at Blackstone & Cullen, an Atlanta-based database
specialist who concentrates on Microsoft SQL Server work, says he rarely
sees IDS in competitive bids.
"There used to be pockets of IDS out there but we haven't seen them in a
few years," Cullen said. However, the SQL Server power base remains mostly
in smaller businesses and in departments of large companies

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