ZDNet UK / News and Analysis / Infrastructure / Servers

New CPUs fuel server competition

By Jonathan Blackwood, CNet, 17 April, 2002 15:11

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Topics

IBM, Servers, Sun Microsystems, CPU

ANALYSIS
It's becoming a buyer's market, in more ways than one. Not only do new servers offer ever-higher performance at better and better prices, but new, self-healing technologies -- such as IBM's eLiza initiative -- and hot-swappable components boost reliability, as well. And now that server partitioning is available in virtually all market segments (including Intel-based machines), a single server can take the place of several, resulting in lower acquisition costs and much easier management. The server marketplace has been increasingly competitive in recent years as PC makers sought to mine additional profitability lost on the desktop side of their businesses by gaining market share in the much more profitable server arena. But with the collapse of the dot-com bubble, the server marketplace has borne more resemblance to a gladiator ring than ordinary gentlemanly competition. Not only have the vendors had to compete with each other, they also competed against nearly new servers auctioned off at fire sale prices. This competition exists across the entire range of server lines, from the new, sub-$1,000 Unix servers from Unix market leaders Sun and Hewlett-Packard, all the way up to the latest high-end (more than $1M) Unix servers from Sun, HP, IBM and Fujitsu. And the latest Intel server processors--both Foster (IA-32) and McKinley (IA-64)--can just as easily be employed to run Unix or Linux as they can to run Windows. IBM has announced a new line of servers called the eServer x440 with Enterprise X-Architecture, based at present on Intel's Foster Xeon chips, but anticipated to move to Intel's McKinley Itanium chips within the next year to two years. The new line at present supports up to 16 processors, and can be split into four partitions and up to 64 virtual partitions. These new servers are intended to run either Windows or Linux, and IBM insists that when outfitted with Linux, the x440 breaks new ground in performance, scalability, reliability, and low initial cost--resulting in a dramatic reduction in TCO over the life of the product. At the high end, IBM's line of "Regatta" servers, the pSeries 690, with 32 processors competes head-on against Sun's 64-processor Fire 15K, HP's 64-processor Superdome, and Fujitsu's 128-processor Primepower 2000. According to IBM, it achieves approximate parity with the higher-processor count competition through putting two 1GHz+ processors on a single piece of silicon with a high-bandwidth system switch, and a large memory cache and I/O. The higher-speed data transfer this design allows means the performance equals that of competing servers that have more processors. Cost advantages ensue because the licensing deals of some software companies (such as Oracle) are based on the processor count of the server rather than the number of seats or transactions or total system throughput. The server market will see even more technological changes in the coming years. Large servers will gradually give way, first to rack-mounted blade servers, then by a new generation of "servers on a chip," which will take IBM's notion of multiple processors and other system components on a single chip of silicon to the next level. And new higher-speed buses -- beyond the scope of Fibre Channel or InfiniBand -- will finally get rid of the rack and system cases as we know them today, resulting in the wide-scale adoption of so-called "fabric" computing. In this extension of clustered servers, computing resources are tied together into virtual supercomputers, with the physical location of the resources themselves becoming nearly irrelevant. Thanks to the fierce competition, server designs are improving steadily, and the TCO proposition is quickly being transformed--to the benefit of IT departments everywhere. Not only are the new systems easier to manage, they're cheaper on the front end, as well. Prices will continue to go down, both because of heightened competition, and improvements in the underlying technology.
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