Unisys Launches New Unified ES7000 Server

Published: May 9, 2006

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Server maker Unisys may have forged a server alliance with former Japanese competitor NEC last October, but it still had its own engineering underway for a new generation of ES7000 servers. Unisys was hinting at LinuxWorld a few months ago that the new machines would be here soon, and here they are. The ES7000/one servers, as they are called, support both Itanium and Xeon processors and Windows and Linux operating systems.

Like the prior generations of the ES7000s, the new ES7000/one machines are based on a cell architecture, what Unisys used to call Cellular MultiProcessor, or CMP. This is the approach that most modern servers use, although it goes by many different names. With the Xeon or Itanium chip architectures, scaling beyond four processors in a way that provides coherency for cache memories (which allows a single instance of an operating system to span multiple processors) requires a cell board approach with very high-bandwidth, low-latency links between cell boards.

Unisys started out with Xeon processors way back when in late 2000, when the first ES7000s shipped, and when the second-generation "Dylan" ES7000/500 servers launched in the spring of 2003, they came out the door supporting 32-bit Xeon processors and were engineered to have a variant that supported 64-bit Itanium processors from Intel. While the original ES7000s used four-socket cell boards, the ES7000/500s used cell boards that had eight sockets, which allows Unisys, in theory, to greatly expand the scalability of the machines. With the ES7000/one machines, its third generation of ES7000 boxes, Unisys is returning to a four-socket cell board. By doing so, Unisys can offer much better granularity on hardware partitions. The new machine scales just as far as the ES7000/500s, too, with up to 32 sockets, and with the addition of dual-core processors, customers will be able to put up to 64 processor cores in a single system.

The ES7000/one machines support the current "Madison" Itanium processors, and according to Mark Feverston, vice president of platform marketing for enterprise servers, these machines are ready to ship with Intel's late and much-anticipated "Montecito" dual-core Itaniums. (I said they were late, he didn't. And much as Hewlett-Packard's "Arches" chipset and the related Integrity servers were ready for the Montecito processors last year, I think that Unisys has been ready for some time with the ES7000/one machines to launch with Montecito, but just couldn't wait for Intel any longer.) Right now, the ES7000/one servers support the 1.5 GHz/ 4 MB, 1.6 GHz/6 MB, and 1.6 GHz/9 MB Itaniums. The boxes can also be equipped with single- and dual-core Xeon processors. Specifically, Unisys is supporting the 2.83 GHz/4MB and 3.33 GHz/8 MB "Potomac" Xeon MPs with single cores, and the dual-core "Paxville" Xeon MPs, which come at a 2.66 GHz speed with 1 MB of cache per core using a 667 MHz front side bus and at a 3 GHz speed with 2 MB of cache per core and an 800 MHz front side bus. Unisys supports configurations with four, eight, 12, 16, 24, and 32 sockets, and up to one hard partition per cell board.

While the ES7000/one machines can support both Itanium and Xeon processors concurrently in the same chassis, customers cannot mix and match processors on the same cell board because the two chips have very different socket structures (something Intel has promised to fix, but that "unified platform" project has been pushed out indefinitely). No matter. Unisys did some engineering that gives the functional equivalent to customers. Each Xeon-base cell board in the machine has 48 MB of shared cache, while the Itanium-based boards have 64 MB of cache; this cache is above and beyond on the on-chip cache Intel has on the Xeon and Itanium processors. Each cell board can support up to 32 GB of main memory using 2 GB DIMMs, and when 4 GB DIMMs become more common and affordable, Unisys will support up to 64 GB per cell board, for a maximum of 512 GB for the system. This may seem a little light, considering that IBM's p5 595 and HP's Superdomes currently support 1 TB and will soon support 2 TB, but there are very few servers in the world that need such memory scalability. Such large memories are great for benchmarks, and for demonstrating head room. Each cell board has five PCI-X slots and two Gigabit Ethernet ports, with an optional RAID disk controller and room for three SAS drives. With expansion modules, the ES7000/one server supports up to 88 PCI-X slots. Each cell comes in a 3U chassis, which means a fully loaded system (minus I/O expansion) takes up a little more than half of a rack.

The ES7000/one servers support Microsoft's Windows Server 2003 operating system, with Standard Edition, Enterprise Edition, and Data Center Edition all supported. Customers have to use either Windows Server 2003 SP1 or R2 on the machines, and the edition they choose will depend on how scalable they want the partition to be. Windows only supports 64 threads right now, and that is the limiting factor in scalability, since the Paxville and Montecito chips support HyperThreading virtual threads. With dual-core chips with HT, a single instance of Windows will only span 16 sockets, or half of the machine--unless, of course, customers turn off the HT feature. Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 and Red Hat's Enterprise Linux Server 4 are supported on the machines as well in "select configurations," something Unisys didn't explain. Customers can mix and match Xeon and Itanium chips and Windows and Linux inside a single frame, but each pairing of operating system and processor has to be isolated on its own set of cell boards--unless, of course, companies deploy their operating systems on VMware virtual servers. Then, things are a lot more fluid.

The new ES7000/one servers have utility-style capacity on demand features, just like the prior ES7000/500 machines did, but this time, Unisys has learned from experience and made the processor increments more granular so the machine can be used to deploy not just CPU-hungry database workloads, but also application and infrastructure tiers. With the ES7000/500s, a feature called "real time capacity" allowed customers to buy an eight-socket cell board, but only activate four of the sockets. Then, if the need arose--perhaps at week, month, or year closings, when data processing activity tends to increase--customers could turn on four more processors, use them for a while, and then turn them off. With the ES7000/one machines, Feverston says that the granularity has been cut in half, so companies can activate as little as two sockets. He explained that the RTC feature works at the socket level, not the core level, so if companies move to dual-core machines, they will not be able to scale down to one socket.

Feverston did a little bit of bragging about the engineering that went into the ES7000/one machines, saying that he expected the machines to hit close to 750,000 transactions per minute (TPM) on the TPC-C online transaction processing benchmark test running the same Windows stack and using the same Paxville processors that IBM has in its xSeries servers. (This test was for a 16-socket configuration, apparently.) The Unisys machine will deliver about 50 percent more TPMs than the IBM box at about the same cost per transaction. "If we are using the same software and processors, then the difference is all about architecture," brags Feverston.

Unisys is counting on not just raw performance and the ability to mix and match different chips and operating systems to help bolster ES7000 sales, but is looking for virtualization software to help as well. "We now have a platform that is highly flexible. We now have the ability to squeeze every ounce out of performance. We have a true mainframe platform, but it is all standards-based." Being an actual mainframe vendor, Unisys doesn't think this is a bad thing--and neither do the RISC/Unix vendors who have aspired to the same for more than a decade.

The base ES7000/one server will cost around $35,000, with four sockets populated with dual-core Paxville processors, 8 GB of main memory, and a few disk drives. A machine with 32 sockets full of Paxville processors and 32 GB of main memory will sell for around $500,000.

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