Earlier this month, IBM announced an overhaul of its System i division that resulted in the blending of System i sales with System p sales in two distinct units: the Business Systems Unit, focused on small and midsize businesses, and the Power Systems Unit, focused on the enterprise.

By and large, the move was applauded by analysts who said the change in structure should help IBM better expand its customer base for the System i.

To that end, IBM last week provided a preview of the new operating system for the System i, saying that i5/OS Version 6 would be out in 2008. The new version will take advantage of advancements in the new Power6 chip by offering better security and virtualization capabilities, as well as broader support for Web services by including a Web application server built into the software. You can read about the Power6 chip and its features here.

IBM also announced a new Power6-based System i box – the System i 570 – which will have the new processor, but will run the current version of i5/OS until the new version of the OS ships. In the meantime, the current OS has been tweaked to support the MySQL open source database, IBM says. That means more open source applications will be supported on the System i hardware. The hardware itself is modular, consisting of up to four nodes with one to four processors each so that the i570 can be as large as a 16-way SMP box. IBM is offering a kind of pay-per-use pricing for the i570, as well. Get more specifics on the i570 here). The product should be available in September and priced starting at $165,000.

Read Network World’s report and get more detail on IBM’s System i news here.

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