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Intel Talks Up Dual-Core Chips, but 'Dempsey' Xeons and 'Montecito' Itaniums Still Far Away

If Intel wants anything, it is to prevent being perceived as being behind rival Advanced Micro Devices, which is angling to get its dual-core Opteron chips into the market sometime this summer. Intel desperately wants to get its "Potomac" and "Cranford" Xeon MPs, which have 64-bit memory extensions and HyperThreading simultaneous multithreading on each single-core chip, into the field ahead of the dual-core Opterons.

According to the latest Intel roadmaps, the Potomac and Cranford Xeon MP processors are being collectively grouped together as the "Truland" family of chips, and they could be announced at Intel Developer Forum in early March, for delivery in late March or early April. Intel will be delivering a Pentium 4 Extreme Edition for high-end gaming machines and workstations, but this won't be much good in servers. While Intel says it has over ten multicore projects underway in the labs, what it really needs in order to compete with Opterons in the server space is dual-core Xeon DPs and MPs and dual-core Itaniums. The "Dempsey" dual-core Xeons, probably for two-way machines, and probably using 65 nanometer processes, are expected in early 2006. That gives AMD about a six-month lead on Intel in the server racket. Intel is clearly betting that 64-bit support plus HyperThreading are good enough against dual-core Opterons without HyperThreading. We'll see.

The current implementation of the "Montecito" dual-core Itaniums (the original Montecito was single-core and was due last year) is now expected to start shipping at the end of 2005, and is expected to be certified in systems beginning in early 2006. Montecitos are expected to have an incredible 1.7 billion transistors, almost all of which covers the 24 MB of L3 cache memory on the chips. They are expected to run at between 1.6 GHz (like the current Itanium 2s) and 2 GHz. Montecitos will, however, have about three times the performance per socket, thanks to HyperThreading and other tweaks. Moreover, Montecito will only burn 100 watts, compared with the 130 watts of the "Madison" Itanium 2s.

Arkeia Backs Up Open-Xchange Groupware

Arkeia, one of the top providers of tape backup and archiving software for Linux platforms, announced that it has integrated its backup solution with Netline Internet Service's Open-Xchange Server groupware.

Netline is the German software company that originally created the Linux-based groupware product that eventually because SUSE Openexchange Server. When Novell bought SUSE, in late 2003, Openexchange Server conflicted with Novell's GroupWise software, and eventually Netline saw the wisdom in taking the product back and developing it to run atop any Linux, instead of being tightly coupled with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 8. Now Netline is getting ready to go commercial with its Open-Xchange Server, and needs an archiving solution for it.

Enter Arkeia, which has created a variant of its own archiving products that can keep a hot-backup of the PostgreSQL database and LDAP server at the heart of Open-Xchange Server. (We use Openexchange Server here at IT Jungle, and we can tell you from personal experience that such a capability would come in pretty handy.) Customers can hook into Open-Xchange Server from either Arkeia Network Backup or Arkeia Server Backup. The Arkeia solution will also, by the way, integrate with the existing Openexchange Server from Novell, which the company is still selling and supporting. The plug-in for the Arkeia software costs $690, and the first release candidate for that plug-in will be available this week.

IBM Launches Faster 'Irwindale' Xeon Servers

IBM will this week deliver versions of its xSeries and BladeCenter servers that employ the new "Irwindale" Xeon DP processor from Intel. The Irwindale chip is a variant of the 64-bit "Nocona" processor, except that it has 2 MB of L2 cache memory as well as the new Demand Based Switching and SpeedStep power management and Execute Disable security enhancement. It has an 800 MHz frontside bus, just like the Nocona chip, which means it can plug into the exact same slots (see the separate story in this issue for more on the Irwindale chip).

IBM says that the xSeries and BladeCenter blade servers equipped with the new Irwindale chips, which have twice as much cache memory as the Noconas, can provide as much as an 18 percent performance boost, according to Intel's internal benchmarks. But the Irwindales are expected to run at the same clock speeds as the Noconas, so this will only be true on applications that can make use of that larger cache.

IBM says that the Irwindale chips will ship in four of its two-way servers and the HS20 two-way blade servers by the end of February. The xSeries 226 is a 4U tower or rack machine that supports from 512 MB to 16 GB of main memory, and 1.8 TB of internal SCSI or 1 TB of internal SATA disks, and has three PCI-X, two PCI, and one PCI-Express slot. It costs $1,225 with a single Irwindale chip running at 3 GHz plus 512 MB of memory and no disk; it costs $1,475 to buy the machine with a three-year warranty. The xSeries 236 is a slightly larger 5U tower or rack server that supports the same memory configurations, but has room for nine disks. It has three PCI-X, two PC-Express, and one PCI slot. It comes with a three-year warranty and costs $2,399 with a single 3 GHz processor, 1 GB of main memory, no disks, and a three-year warranty. The xSeries 336 is a 1U, rack-mounted server that can house two disk drives (300 GB SCSI Or 250 GB SATA) and has two PCI-X slots and an optional PCI-Express slot. It supports up to 16 GB of main memory as well, and costs $2,359 in a base configuration (1 GB of memory, one 3 GHz chip, no disk, and a three-year warranty). And, finally, the xSeries 346 is a 2U rack-mounted server with four PCI-X or two PCI-X and two PCI-Express slots that has the same memory expansion as the other Irwindale-based xSeries machines being announced today. A base xSeries 346 comes with one 3 Ghz processor and 1 GB of main memory; it costs $2,745 with that three-year warranty. IBM did not provide pricing on the HS20 blades.

Scyld Releases Beowulf Series 29 cz-5 Clustering Update

The Scyld Software subsidiary of Penguin Computing is rolling out its next release of the commercialized Beowulf clustering software for Linux servers. Beowulf Series 29 cz-5 is based on the Linux 2.4.27 kernel, like prior Series 29 releases. The latest release, however, is weaving an open-source distributed system monitoring program with a graphical dashboard, called Ganglia, into the BeoMaster Beowulf cluster management software.

The way Scyld has tweaked Beowulf, explains Walt Wallach, vice president of software development, the master node in a cluster runs all of the clustering and management software embodied in BeoMaster (and implemented in Linux 2.4 kernel extensions) while the compute nodes in the cluster run a streamlined Linux kernel and none of the daemons that a normal cluster would require. This architecture means that compute nodes spend their time computing, not managing. While many Linux clusters are equipped with Ganglia, which was created at the University of California at Berkeley, the standard setup requires daemons running on all nodes. Scyld has woven Ganglia into BeoMaster in such a way that the agents used to feed BeoMaster data from the compute nodes are now feeding data into the Ganglia management program. Ganglia supplements BeoMaster; it does not replace it.

Scyld will also be announcing that Series 29 cz-5 will support Penguin's own BladeRunner blade servers, and an expanding set of InfiniBand interconnection fabrics. Scyld is also announcing a new customer support portal for customers who have contractual support contracts, to help them gain access to tips and tricks for making BeoWulf clusters sit up and bark. Scyld Series 29 cz-5 will be available at the end of March; in a base configuration, the software costs $3,500 for a master node and $500 per compute node.

Novell, IBM Partner for Power-Linux Push

Just ahead of LinuxWorld this week, Novell and IBM have announced a joint development effort to get more independent software companies creating Linux applications for IBM's Power-based server platforms.

Under the promotion, the two companies are providing prospective application porters who sign up for the deal between now and the end of March with 90 days of free technical support and an evaluation copy of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 for iSeries, pSeries, or OpenPower servers. Customers have to come up with their own iron, but IBM and Novell are giving developers a software development kit that helps them to begin the job of porting. IBM and Novell are also making vague promises about co-marketing and sales support, but what it really means is that you can register your application to be included in a big database of applications that support Linux-Power. You can sign up on Novell's site to participate in the program.

IBM Rolls Out Compact, Two-Core p5 Unix/Linux Server

The p5 510 is a rack-mounted machine that fits in a 2U form factor and comes with a dual-core Power5 chip. You can read all about it in The Unix Guardian, our Unix newsletter. (See "IBM Rolls Out Compact, Two-Core p5 Unix/Linux Server" for more details.)

Financing Advantage Helps IBM Speed Up Deals for SMBs

While IBM has been offering various low-rate financing deals for its hardware, software, and services for many years, companies that fall into the small or midsized revenue brackets often have a much harder time obtaining financing on IT wares than their counterparts at large organizations.

That is why IBM's Global Financing unit has launched a new worldwide program called Financing Advantage. The company may not want to take unwarranted risks in lending to SMBs, which do not always have steady sales or squeaky-clean credit, but this is the fastest growing sector of the IT market, and everyone selling IT product is figuring out how to go after it.

One of the things that IBM has learned is that SMB companies that may want to come to IBM for financing often want to finance non-IBM gear, so the Financing Advantage program, which went live last week in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Australia, and Japan, allows for this. IBM says that the Financing Advantage program offers competitive rates and a credit approval process that can within one hour give the thumbs up or thumbs down to SMBs that try to finance as much as $300,000 in gear. IBM is providing the financing through a rapid online financing tool, and some 1,200 of its resellers have been certified to use it. Both IBM and its resellers want to not only do more business in the SMB space but also do it more quickly, which helps drive up customer satisfaction and retention.

Financing Advantage is available immediately in France, Germany, and the United Kingdom, and will be rolled out in other geographies throughout the year.