The Linux Beacon--Fujitsu Chases $2 Billion with PrimeQuest Itanium Boxes

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Volume 2, Number 15 -- April 12, 2005

Fujitsu Chases $2 Billion with PrimeQuest Itanium Boxes

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

As expected, Japanese server maker Fujitsu last week rolled out its "Mission Critical IA Server," an Itanium-based server line that will sit beside the Primergy X86 servers and PrimePower Sparc servers that the Fujitsu-Siemens partnership peddles around the world. The new Itanium machines are called PrimeQuest, and Fujitsu thinks it can generate $2 billion in sales over the next few years from these Windows and Linux boxes, mainly because some companies don't want big Unix iron and they have outgrown 32-bit X86 iron.

To the surprise of many in the industry, in January 2003 Fujitsu and Intel announced that they would collaborate to build a new line of enterprise-class, mainframe-style servers based on Intel's 64-bit Itanium processors and code-named "Pleiades." At the original announcement back in January 2003, Fujitsu and Intel said that the Pleiades boxes would be based on a chipset that could support both 32-bit Xeon and 64-bit Itanium processors. The expectation was that a 128-way Xeon box would ship at the end of 2004, and that in early 2005, a 128-way machine using dual-core "Montecito" processors would ship. From the beginning, Fujitsu said that it would have Linux running on the Pleiades boxes and did not say much about Windows, aside from conceding that it could, in theory, be run on them.

Then, in June 2004, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and Fujitsu chairman Naoyuki Akikusa announced a new global alliance that would see the two collaborate on bringing the Windows platform to the Pleiades servers. Fujitsu agreed to support Windows on the boxes, but asked for Microsoft's help in porting Fujitsu's NetCOBOL and Interstage Business Application Manager (which already support .NET) to fit into the future Longhorn Server world and in integrating Microsoft Operations Manager and Fujitsu's own Systemwalker system management tools. The two also agreed to tune Windows 2003 and SQL Server 2005 (which is still not here) for the Pleiades platform, and create dynamic system partitions with the Windows environment.

The PrimeQuest boxes that Fujitsu has brought to market a little more that two years later are different in one big way: There is no support for the Xeon processors, whether you are talking about 32-bit Xeons, which are history, or 64-bit Xeons, which are just becoming available in the Xeon MP flavors that the Pleiades boxes would need. The Xeon MPs went the way of Siemens at this PrimeQuest server announcement, which is exactly where Roebuck ended up at Sears. No one said a word about Xeon-based machines. No one said anything about 128-way scalability, either. And it was also a little odd that Fujitsu was running the whole show for the PrimeQuest launch. But, then again, it was apparently Fujitsu that paid to have the 500 hardware and software engineers create the PrimeQuest line in the past two years and it will be Fujitsu that is pumping $300 million over the next two to three years into pumping up the Itanium ecosystem as it relates to Windows and Linux applications. So maybe Fujitsu's top brass from Japan was entitled to hog the whole announcement show in San Francisco as it did today.

Chiaki Ito, executive vice president of Fujitsu, said that the company's Japanese, Asian, and North American units in addition to the Fujitsu-Siemens partnership in Europe, hoped to sell 10,000 of the PrimeQuest servers over the next three years, and that this would generate approximately $2 billion in server sales for these organizations collectively. How much of those PrimeQuest sales will be incremental and how much will eat into Primergy, PrimePower, and GS21 mainframe sales (the GS mainframes are only sold in Japan) remains to be seen.

But as Richard McCormack, vice president of product and solutions marketing at Fujitsu Computer Systems (the North American sales organization) explained, what Fujitsu-Siemens wants is the broadest possible line of servers, offering Xeon-based Windows and Linux boxes that scale up to eight processors, Itanium-based Windows and Linux boxes that scale up to 32 processors, and Sparc-based Solaris servers that scale up to 128 processors. While Fujitsu is certainly not backing off on its commitment to Sparc/Solaris, as evidenced by the "Jupiter" server line it is developing under its partnership with Sun Microsystems (also referred to as the Advanced Product Line). But Fujitsu clearly has big plans for its Itanium boxes. "PrimeQuest will allow us to challenge very strongly in the data center, particularly against IBM and Hewlett-Packard," he said. That $2 billion figure over the next three years for PrimeQuest sales is an impressive statement when you consider that Fujitsu is a $45 billion company and it hopes to have a 15 percent share of the high-end server market over the next couple of years, thanks to the PrimeQuest and PrimePower boxes. (By high-end, Fujitsu means machines that have a base price of $100,000 or more.) Ito said that Fujitsu expected that sales of the PrimeQuest machines would break pretty evenly across the three major markets for Fujitsu-Siemens--Asia/Pacific, North America, and Europe.

The PrimeQuest servers are built around a four-way cell board architecture, but the Pleiades chipset has a new twist to it in that the chipset can break the cell board into two partitioned virtual machines that can mirror each other's work for an extra measure of high availability. The servers also include a feature called flexible I/O, which allows the I/O subsystems in the PrimeQuest server to allocate and re-allocate I/O resources (disk and network bandwidth) automatically without having to reconfigure the wiring coming out of the server. This I/O feature is all controlled in a software switch, which will make it very useful to companies that consolidate Windows and Linux workloads onto PrimeQuest boxes and those workloads change a lot along with their I/O needs.

While the PrimeQuest servers can use today's 1.6 GHz/9 MB cache or 1.5 GHz/4 MB cache "Madison" Itanium 2 processors from Intel, the systems were designed to support the future dual-core "Montecito" Itanium chip, which is expected to be delivered to server makers at the end of 2005 and to start shipping in early 2006. The PrimeQuest boxes will also support the kicker "Montvale" dual-core Itanium processors, which are due in 2006. The move to the four-core "Tukwila" chips will probably necessitate a change in system backplanes and I/O subsystems in 2007. Fujitsu didn't say anything about the first-generation PrimeQuest machines being able to run with Tukwila chips, so it stands to reason that they will not.

There are two variants of the PrimeQuest servers. The PrimeQuest 440 scales up to 16 processors, which is four system boards. Each system board has four Itanium processor sockets and 32 main memory slots. Fujitsu is shipping 2 GB DIMM memory in the servers now, but will ship 4 GB DIMMs when they become financially practical, boosting the maximum main memory in the PrimeQuest 440 from its current 256 GB to 512 GB. The PrimeQuest 440 has support for 16 SCSI disk drives, for a maximum of 2.35 TB of internal disk space, and will obviously hook into external disk arrays and SANs. The point-to-point crossbar switch that links the cell boards in the server has a maximum sustained bandwidth of 51.2 GB/sec, which is pretty serious for a 16-way server, and when Fujitsu says it will take the top spots in the TPC-C, SAP, and Oracle benchmark tests for Windows and Linux platforms, it is this I/O bandwidth that is going to help accomplish this. (Fujitsu was careful not to say "all platforms" because IBM's Power5 "Squadron" servers will still probably beat PrimeQuest, core for core, on any of these tests. Luckily for Fujitsu, Power5 servers don't run Windows and IBM hasn't scaled Linux on them to 32-way or 64-way processing.) The PrimeQuest 440 has 64 PCI-X slots, 16 integrated Gigabit Ethernet ports, and six 100 Mbit Ethernet ports, all of which are dynamically reconfigurable across partitions in the server. The PrimeQuest 400 supports up to four partitions--it is unclear if these are physical or logical partitions, but they had better be logical. The PrimeQuest 480 is essentially two PrimeQuest 440s glued together to create a machine with a single system image that spans 32 processors, has 512 GB of main memory (soon to be 1 TB when 4 GB DIMMs are out), and double the slots, ports, and bandwidth of the PrimeQuest 440. Pricing information was not available as we went to press.

Auto maker Toyota is the first customer to take a delivery of the PrimeQuest machines, and Fujitsu says that they will be generally available on a worldwide basis in June. Red Hat's Enterprise Linux 4 has already been certified on the boxes, and Fujitsu is working with Novell to get SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 certified on it by September. (If that seems like a long time, Red Hat partnered with Fujitsu two years ago, and Novell has a tight partnership with Fujitsu's rival in Japan, NEC for its 32-way Itanium boxes, the Express5800 "Asama" servers.) Fujitsu says that it hopes to have Windows Server 2003 certified on the PrimeQuest servers before the fall--but we shall see.