NEC's Fault Tolerant Extensions Go Mainstream in Linux

Published: August 22, 2006

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Server marker NEC announced at LinuxWorld last week that it has worked with the Linux community to get the hooks its fault tolerant servers require to operate into the Linux kernel. Red Hat will be the first vendor to officially support these hooks, and will do so in its new Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS 4 Update 4.

NEC's American arm made the announcement, and said that Red Hat's Linux had been certified on its Express5800/320Ma fault tolerant boxes. The certification was done on RHEL AS 4 Update 4, which was quietly released on August 10. NEC has been shipping its own Linux distribution, itself a variant of an older Red Hat release, for three years. But that variant of Red Hat required its own certification process for the applications that ran on top of it, and that slowed down the adoption of the NEC FT servers because, as we all know, applications drive server sales.

NEC offered the proprietary hooks needed to create a fault tolerant machine--which has two machines run the same software stack in lockstep, so in the event of an error, there is no failover, just continuous processing--to the Linux community, and that it took some time to get them woven into the Linux 2.6 kernel and then into the Red Hat distribution. Because the changes were made to the Linux kernel itself, Novell's SUSE distribution as well as others could soon support and be certified on these NEC FT machines.

The Express5800/320Ma machines are based on Intel's "Paxville" dual-core Xeon DP processors as well as the single-core "Irwindale" chips. (The Paxville chips are also known as the Xeon 5000s.) Because it takes time to engineer a fault tolerant server, NEC tends to lag the current chip hardware by one generation, so the machines do not yet support the new "Woodcrest" Core Xeon 5100 chips. NEC uses the 2.8 GHz Paxvilles as well as 3.2 GHz and 3.6 GHz Xeon DPs, and the machine supports up to 16 GB of logical memory and 1.2 TB of logical storage. The Express5800/320Ma will be available in September, and has a starting list price of $25,598.

In addition to announcing the support of RHEL AS 4 Update 4, NEC is also offering to install the software on the box for customers and to provide the front end technical support for the operating system, much as other server markers do for their own boxes. RHEL AS costs $1,299 for a one-year subscription on the NEC FT box, which includes 9x5 business hour support. And between now and the end of 2006, NEC is offering an upgrade to 24x7 support, which is valued at $2,099, for free.