Guild Companies

Unisys is today rolling out a new line of compact, lower-priced Intel-based servers based on its Cellular MultiProcessor (CMP) architecture. The CMP architecture debuted in 2000 with the initial ES7000s, which scaled from 4 to 32 processors in a single frame that spanned two cabinets. The new "Dylan" ES7000 machines pack eight processors on a single cell board and into 4U rack chassis; four of these eight-ways can be glued together to make a 32-way server with a single system image.

According to Mark Feverston, vice president of platform marketing for Unisys enterprise servers, the Dylan machines, which will be sold under the ES7000/500 moniker, are not intended to be the company's entry into the commodity server market. Unisys got out of that market a number of years ago, and has been focusing its engineering and marketing efforts on extending the Wintel architecture into the mainframe arena where Unisys has plenty of know-how thanks to its Sperry and Burroughs mainframe lines (which are now sold under the ClearPath brand). "We are not trying to be a commodity player," said Feverston at a briefing with the press last week in one of its server development labs located outside of Philadelphia. "But we are going to attract commodity buyers."

He cited statistics from one of the big market researchers (unnamed) that showed Unisys holding a 60 percent share of the market for Wintel servers with eight or more processors. IBM is moving up into the 16-way space with its latest rev on the xSeries 440 server running the 32-bit "Gallatin" Pentium 4 Xeon MP processors from Intel and promising to deliver a 32-way version sometime in the future. Hewlett-Packard has ramped up the performance of its eight-way ProLiants with the "F8" ProLiant DL760 G2 servers, which also use the Gallatin chips, and is working on a 64-way line of Itanium servers due this summer, maybe in June. NEC has announced a 32-way Itanium box and Bull has announced a 16-way Itanium box. Unisys is facing some competition down at the bottom of the ES7000 range, and when the 64-bit version of Windows Server 2003 is ready for primetime this summer, it will be feeling the heat across the whole ES7000 range. That's why Unisys has foregone using Intel's E8870 chipset or ServerWorks' GC chipset to make four-way, eight-way, and larger ES7000 machines and used its own CMP chipset to create a much more dense offering than would be possible using those chipsets. "We own this market, we will keep this market, and we will grow this market," vows Feverston. The Dylan announcements are just the first of a number of moves Unisys will make this year to push the ES7000 business.

There are four different configurations of the ES7000/500 Dylan servers, and all of them are based on the basic eight-way, 4U rack-mounted module, which is called the ES7000 Aries 510, and all of them support the 1.5 GHz/1 MB cache or 2 GHz/2 MB cache Gallatin processors. The Aries 510 machine can have four, six, or eight of these processors. The four-way version has 16 MB of shared L4 cache on the cell board, and the six-way and eight-way versions have 32 MB of L4 cache. The Aries 510 supports up to 16 GB of main memory (with 256 GB/sec of sustained memory bandwidth) and eight PCI slots (with 1.28 GB/sec of sustained I/O bandwidth). This server will run Microsoft's Windows 2000 Advanced Server and SCO's UnixWare 7.1.3 and Linux Server 4.0 operating systems. When Windows Server 2003 ships on April 24, the Aries 510 server will support the Enterprise Edition of this operating system, too.

Because the CMP architecture currently only allows hardware partitions at the cell board level, the Aries 510 server cannot be partitioned for two different operating systems at the hardware level. However, Unisys has a partnership with VMware to support its GSX Server virtual machine partitioning on the ES7000 line, and this can be used to carve up the Dylan boxes into smaller virtual machines supporting multiple and incompatible operating systems.

The Aries 520 version of the ES7000/500 series is essentially two of the Aries 510s that present themselves as a single system image to the operating systems. This machine can have from 8 to 16 processors, and has 32 MB of L4 cache for every four Xeon MP processors. It supports eight base PCI slots, which can be expanded to 16 slots. Main memory doubles to 32 GB with the Aries 520, as does memory and I/O bandwidth. The Aries 520 machine supports Windows 2000 Advanced Server and Datacenter Server and will support the Enterprise and Datacenter editions of Windows Server 2003. SCO's UnixWare 7.1.3 and Linux Server 4.0 are also supported. The Orion 530 is a preconfigured cluster of two fully loaded 16-way Aries 520 machines running the Datacenter version of either Windows 2000 or Windows 2003. And finally, the Orion 540 is comprised of four Aries 510 boxes that offer from 16 to 32 processors in a single system image. This 32-way Dylan machine is far more compact than the prior generations of 32-way ES7000s, but it will only support four hardware partitions compared to the eight partitions that the older ES7000s will support because they are based on four-way cell boards.

Although Unisys will not announce the machine today, it is demonstrating a four-way deskside server version of the Aries 510 that it expects some customers will pick up as a departmental server or workstation. Exactly when this machine will be announced is unclear.

None of the Dylan boxes support Intel's 64-bit Itanium processors. Early generations of the ES7000s supported the Itanium processors as well as Pentium III Xeon processors in different four-way cell boards that all plugged into the same ES7000 chassis. It is hard to imagine that Unisys isn't working on similar, compact "Madison" Itanium designs, given that all of the major server vendors aside from Sun (which hates Itanium) and Dell (which is fickle about it, but is starting to show signs of commitment) are creating Itanium machines that will sell in the same space as the ES7000s. Feverston is mum on the subject.

Unisys says that the entry four-way Aries 510 will sell for $35,000 in a usable configuration, with the 32-way Orion 540 selling for $375,000.

To show that it is serious about competing in the eight-way space, Unisys ran the TPC-C online transaction processing benchmark on the eight-way Aries 520 machine and has shown slightly better performance than IBM's xSeries 440 and HP's ProLiant DL760 and dramatically better price/performance. The Dylan eight-way box running Microsoft's Windows Server 2003 Datacenter Edition and SQL Server 2000 Enterprise Edition was able to crank through 118,381 transactions per minute (TPM) at a cost of $5.56 per TPM. IBM's "Summit" chipset in the xSeries 440 was able to do 112,800 TPM at a cost of $6.73 per TPM using eight of the same Intel processors. HP's ProLiant DL760 G2 was able to do 115,026 TPM, which is slightly better performance, but the machine cost $7.69 per TPM.

Feverston claims that the Dylan line offers the same relative price/performance advantages to Unix boxes today, which have declined dramatically in price because of cut-throat competition, as the original ES7000s did against the Unix servers of the 2000 vintage. Back then, Unisys was saying the ES7000s offered the same performance for half as much money, and with the Dylan machines, it is saying the same thing. Unix customers, tired of paying a premium, have always been as much of a target for the ES7000 as Windows customers who had outgrown four-way or eight-way servers.