Fujitsu-Siemens Readies Unnamed Itanium Server

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

The word on the street is that all of the bigwigs from Fujitsu will be coming to San Francisco for a big event on April 5, and the building consensus is that this may be when the Fujitsu-Siemens partnership (which includes German server maker Siemens) will launch its as-yet unnamed Itanium-based enterprise server, which will support both Linux and Windows and will scale up to 32 processors.

Within the past four years, there have probably been more stories questioning the long-term viability of the Sparc and Itanium architectures than any other architecture in the past several decades, aside from the S/390 mainframe back in the mid-1990s (and that machine is still around, too). Both Fujitsu and Siemens are long-term planners; they move slowly and methodically. And they both have every intention of making some money selling Sparc and Itanium servers for the foreseeable future.

Richard McCormack, vice president of product and solutions marketing for the partnership's Fujitsu Computer Systems unit in North America, said the so-called "Mission Critical Intel Architecture" server, the future Itanium-based machine that Fujitsu-Siemens has been working on for more than two years, is also on track for its own launch in the middle of this year. The server has not yet been named, and McCormack quips that he is open to suggestions. (PrimeRib? PrimeDirective? PrimeNumber? PrimeSuspect? You decide.)

Like the PrimePowers, the future Itanium server will be based on a flat SMP architecture. It will scale from four to 32 sockets and from 64 GB to 1 TB of physical main memory. The system will have fully mirrored buses and plenty of autonomic operations features (such as improved fault protection and fault detection) that are typical of mainframe-style and high-end RISC/Unix computing and generally missing from the typical X86 entry or midrange servers. The main memory in the systems will also be mirrored, and the machine, which will support Windows and Linux, will be able to have physical partitions. He said that Fujitsu-Siemens opted for Itanium--and not Xeon or Opteron--for its high-end Intel server because of the resiliency features Itanium has and that these other chips do not.

While McCormack did not say this, it is clear from the timing of the launch of its Itanium server that Fujitsu-Siemens was counting on the dual-core "Montecito" Itanium processors to make a big splash. These processors were originally expected around mid-2005, but last fall were pushed out to initial deliveries at the end of 2005 and volume shipments in early 2006. But because the existing single-core "Madison" Itanium 2 and dual-core Montecito processors are socket-compatible, the Fujitsu-Siemens Itanium box can launch this summer using the Madison chips. The Montecito chips will come in handy for virtual machine partitioning, too. The Montecitos support Intel's "Vanderpool" VT hardware-assisted virtualization technology; the Madisons do not.

These unnamed Itanium servers will be the biggest Linux and Windows iron that Fujitsu-Siemens sells, but not the biggest iron of any platform. Fujitsu-Siemens has even bigger Solaris Unix iron, and it is going to keep getting bigger. Fujitsu's future "Olympus" processor will be at the heart of the so-called Advanced Product Line (APL) servers that Fujitsu, Siemens, and Sun Microsystems will begin selling in the middle of 2006 or so. Olympus is a variation of the Sparc64 VI processor that Fujitsu was designing for its PrimePower Unix servers well before Sun finally came to its senses in June 2004 and partnered with Fujitsu to sell a mixed (though not merged) UltraSparc and Sparc64 Unix server line. Exactly what makes the Olympus chip, which has some design input from Sun, different from the Sparc64 VI processor that Fujitsu was already designing is unclear, and neither Sun nor Fujitsu have tried to clear that up. The "Jupiter" servers running the Olympus processors (which will span from 2.1 GHz to 2.6 GHz) will probably have 64 processor sockets. When it comes to performance, McCormack said he is advising customers that the dual-core Olympus processors will deliver about 2.1 times the performance running in the Jupiter servers as the single-core 1.35 GHz Sparc64 V processors delivered in the current PrimePower XA frames. These Jupiter boxes could have two to three times the performance of the impending Itanium products.

Because there is a Sparc variant of Linux, in theory customers could run Linux on these boxes, but neither Sun nor Fujitsu are supporting this. Sun has, in the past, supported Linux instances running inside domains on Sparc servers. But with Solaris 10, it is offering a Red Hat runtime environment on X86 machines. Because of the binary incompatibility of X86 and Sparc binaries, compiled X86 code cannot run inside this Red Hat runtime on Sparc iron.