Guild Companies--IBM Launches 16-Way xSeries Itanium Server

IBM this week announced a new 16-way server, dubbed the xSeries 455, that will put it head-to-head with big midrange and entry enterprise servers based on the "Madison" Itanium 2 processors from Intel. Unisys, NEC, and Hewlett-Packard are the dominant suppliers of big Itanium 2 boxes so far, and IBM doesn't want to miss out on deals in which companies pick Itanium 2 to run big databases and applications.

The xSeries 455 is based on the "Summit-II" generation of Intel chipsets IBM has created for its own line of NUMA-like symmetric multiprocessing servers. The original Summit chipset debuted in the xSeries 440 server, which scaled to eight Xeon MP processors and for a brief time was available in partitioned 16-way configurations. The xSeries 445, which is also based on a variant of the Summit-II chipset, scaled up to 16 Xeon MP processors in a single-system image and began shipping this summer. IBM launched a four-way Itanium box, the xSeries 450, based on the Summit-II chipset, in May.

The xSeries 455 is a scaled-up version of this machine. The 4U chassis of the four-way xSeries 450 supports four 1.5 GHz Madison chips with their 6 MB L3 caches. The machine also supports 56 GB of main memory. To make an xSeries 455, says Jay Bretzmann, manager of eServer products at IBM, four of these four-ways are lashed together with high-speed links that, through the Summit chipset, provide a single-system image for an operating system to see. The machines can also be partitioned, if customers want to do that, using software from VMware. A single four-way has 6.4 GB/sec of bandwidth between main memory and the main processors, and aggregate system I/O bandwidth is 3.2 GB/sec for each four-way. That gives a 16-way machine 12.8 GB/sec of system bandwidth to play with and a maximum of 224 GB of main memory. The xSeries 455 has hot swap memory and hot swap PCI-X/PCI peripheral cards. The xSeries 450 and 455 machines also have 64 MB of L4 cache memory for each four-way board in the system (the xSeries 440 only had 32 MB per four-way system board). Although this bandwidth and memory capacity is not as much as the biggest RISC/Unix iron, it is close enough to make the machines very powerful. And, more significant, big Itanium boxes off better price/performance on many workloads.

Because of the high wattage of the Itanium 2 processors, IBM is able to pack only four processors in a 4U chassis. With the Xeon MP versions of Summit machines, IBM can cram eight processors into a 4U space. By processor count, the Xeon MP versions of the Summit machines are twice as dense and run at clock speeds that are twice as high. On commercial data processing workloads, however, a 32-way Xeon MP machine does about the same amount of work as a 16-way Itanium, so the computing power per rack is the same. (That's largely the difference between 32-bit and 64-bit memory and addressing.)

The xSeries 455, which will be available this week to customers in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, is made in IBM's plant in Greenock, Scotland. Next week, IBM will start making the machine for the Americas region in its Guadalajara, Mexico, plant. The xSeries 4XX machines are also made for the Asia/Pacific region in IBM's factories in China. (IBM outsourced the manufacturing of its Intel-based servers, except for the xSeries 4XX machines and their BladeCenters, earlier this year to Sanmina-SCI.)

The xSeries 455 can run Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Datacenter Edition in a 16-way configuration, but Linux will not be able to take over the whole machine until the Linux 2.6 kernel, which scales to 32-way configurations, becomes available sometime in 2004. In the meantime, customers can carve up the box into two eight-way Linux boxes, using the 2.4 kernel from Red Hat or SuSE. Some people have questioned IBM's commitment to Itanium, for obvious self-impact reasons and because rival Hewlett-Packard is so committed to the Itanium architecture. Bretzmann says this is nonsense. "We believe there are horses for courses," he says emphatically. "If you need a 64-bit Windows server, this is it."

He also says that the Summit-II chipset will easily let IBM scale its Itanium box up to 32-way configurations, if customers demand it. IBM is planning to ship a 32-way Xeon MP machine in the first quarter of 2004. Bretzmann says the 32-way hardware for the Xeon MP server is finished but it is a matter of final testing. IBM will, however, be putting out benchmarks for the 32-way xSeries box before the end of the year.

A base xSeries 455 Itanium 2 server will have a list price of $21,999, Bretzmann says. A 16-way machine using the 1.5 GHz Madison processors with 32 GB of main memory will cost $309,000. This is a very competitive price compared with RISC/Unix iron.

The xSeries 455 will compete directly with Unisys ES7000 Aries servers, which also scale to 16 Itanium 2 processors in a single-system image and run Windows 2003 as their main operating system. (Linux won't be interesting to most customers on any of these fully loaded machines until it can scale to 16 processors.) HP's Integrity eight-way rx7620 and 16-way rx8620 servers, which were announced last week, can run Windows, Linux, or HP-UX; with the xSeries 455, IBM is clearly going head-to-head with them in Windows shops that need 64-bit support. As for Unix, IBM will probably push its own Power-based machines ahead of these Itanium boxes.

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© 2003 Unisys Corporation and Microsoft Corporation. Unisys is a registered trademark of Unisys Corporation. Microsoft and Windows are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. The names of actual companies and products mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners. (1) Unisys primary market research 1Q03.