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Like every other company selling Windows 2000 Datacenter Server and looking forward to selling Windows Server 2003 Datacenter Edition, Unisys is well aware of the 64 GB memory limit imposed by building servers based on Intel's 32-bit Pentium 4 Xeon processors. That's why Unisys will today start selling a hybrid machine that uses Itanium-based partitions for databases, Xeon-based partitions for application servers, and PCI-based Pentium blade servers for infrastructure workloads. In essence, the ES7000/560 is a network in a box.

Even though the ES7000/560 has a name that is similar to the "Dylan" ES7000/500 series machines that Unisys debuted a few weeks ago, the new machine is not based on the new chipset or eight-way compact cell boards used in the Dylan machines. The ES7000 is obviously using the Unisys Cellular MultiProcessor (CMP) architecture, and it is based on four-way cell boards just like all of the prior generations of ES7000 machines. The fact that Unisys has debuted a hybrid machine using an earlier vintage of CMP boards does not mean it won't eventually offer a denser hybrid Itanium-Pentium machine using the Dylan variants of the CMP. It might. But customers wrestling with big databases don't need to pack 64 processors into a single system image quite yet according to Unisys, and it makes good business sense to build the hybrid box on the four-way cell boards.

The ES7000 is a three-tier server network housed in a single rack with extra room left over for storage and other peripherals. The design of the hybrid box was driven by some customers who needed to support bigger databases, which in the Intel world means Itanium, but whose applications were still 32-bit code that did not need to be changed at this time. The ES7000 supports up to two 16-way 1 GHz "McKinley" Itanium 2 database servers, which can be clustered for high availability or be used to run two different databases. These Itanium-based servers are also being aimed at data warehouse workloads that can make good use of the 512 GB of main memory that Microsoft will be supporting with Windows Server 2003 Datacenter Edition when it ships later this week. The application tier of the ES7000/560 is based on four-way CMP boards that use the 2 GHz "Gallatin" Pentium 4 Xeon MP processors from Intel; these same processors are used in the Dylan machines.

The infrastructure tier is something new that Unisys is targeting. Rather than design its own blade server or thin rack-mounted servers, Unisys has taken a different approach for the infrastructure tier. Unisys has contracted the manufacturing of PCI-based blade servers to a third party (which it will not identify). Up to 42 of these blade servers can be plugged into the ES7000/560. Using up PCI slots to plug in servers may sound like a bad idea, and it would be on a lot of machines, but not so on the ES7000s. Mark Feverston, vice president of platform marketing for Unisys enterprise servers, says the ES7000 frame has 96 PCI slots, and the typical customer only uses 20 to 30 slots in a heavily configured machine. The other slots are generally not used, and Unisys has found a way to put them to good use. The Unisys PCI blades do not use the 32-bit Pentium 4 or Pentium 4 Xeon DP processors. The Pentium 4 burns too hot at 3 GHz and doesn't have enough L3 cache memory, and while the Xeon DP variant has a decent amount of cache, it still burns too hot. Oddly enough, these PCI-based blade servers are based on the 700 MHz and 900 MHz Pentium III Xeon processors, which have a fair amount of L2 cache and which do not throw off a lot of heat. Each of these blade servers has from 512 MB to 2 GB of main memory and has its own I/O, ports, Ethernet links, and such; the blade server can access data through the PCI bus or through the Ethernet port out to SAN or NAS storage. Feverston says customers can buy a raw blade server and install their own infrastructure workloads on it (including Linux and any other Intel-compatible operating systems), but Unisys has created bundled Windows 2000 blades that have Web servers, Terminal Services, DNS, CheckPoint security, Active Directory, and other common Windows infrastructure applications all ready to go on the blades. Future blades will have Windows 2003 variants.

What Unisys will be stressing, in addition to the large main memory support in the ES7000/560, is that the whole shebang can be managed from its Server Sentinel systems management software. Even the blade servers.

Depending on what is configured on the PCI-based blade servers, prices range from $1,500 to $2,000, including the Windows operating systems and infrastructure applications. A base ES7000/560 comes with an eight-way Itanium 2 server (two boards), a 16-way Xeon MP server (four CMP boards) with 8 GB of main memory, and a handful of blade servers. Including software and installation services, this machine will sell for $300,000. The ES7000/560 is available immediately worldwide, and it will be one of the machines Microsoft will be demonstrating at the Windows 2003 launch in San Francisco on April 24.