Newisys Launches Baby NAS, Working Away on Horus Chipset

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

While formerly independent Opteron server maker Newisys may have seen a bunch of its top techies move over to partner Advanced Micro Devices, there is no shortage of smart people in the world and Newisys, which has been part of contract IT manufacturer Sanmina-SCI, continues to innovate. Specifically, Newisys has created a tiny Linux-based RAID array and is still plugging away on its high-end "Horus" chipset for enterprise-class Opteron servers.

The NA-1400 RAID disk array is interesting in a bunch of different ways. First, it is based on low-cost SATA drives as well as on a low-power, low-cost XScale 80219 600 processor from Intel (formerly known as the ARM RISC processors) with 32 KB of data cache. The NA-1400 appliance has a single 256 MB DDR SDRAM memory stick, which can be expanded to 512 MB. The software-based RAID is implemented in the stripped-down Linux kernel on the box, and it supports RAID 0, 1, and 5 levels. The box is designed to hold four SATA disks, which come in 160 GB, 250 GB, 400 GB, and 500 GB capacities. It has two USB ports on the front and two Gigabit Ethernet ports in the rear to allow it to be connected to clients and servers. Perhaps most interestingly, its thermals and cooling airflow have been designed so it pulls from the bottom and pushes it out the top, which means it can be jammed up against the wall and still not cook itself. Ironically, it is about the size of a toaster. The 120-watt supply is also, like many devices, external to the array, which also helps keep it cool and compact. On initial boost, when the current draw is highest, it only pulls about 85 watts, too.

The NA-1400 supports SMB, CIFS, XFS, HTTP, CIM Client, and FTP file access and is aimed at supporting Windows and Linux clients. The SMB software has been set up to act as a printer server for USB-connected printers and it can be configured with a Linux-compatible Windows 2000 Active Directory service as well as a journaling file system; it can support up to 20 simultaneous connections and delivers between 18 MB/sec and 22 MB/sec of file serving performance, according to Barry Hutt, director of storage systems for Newisys. The SMB file serving and FTP software, which is based on the NAS OS from ApplianceWare, will be available in the first quarter of 2006.

With four 250 GB SATA disks, the NA-1400 will cost $949, or just under a buck a gigabyte. It is aimed at home users, remote offices, and small businesses, all of which have substantial data sharing and storage needs these days, but who cannot afford to be $10,000 for a disk array. Newisys is partnering with Bell Microproducts to distribute the NA-1400, and will be partnering to add other software functionality to the small array. Backup, storage lifecycle management, and antivirus software seem like obvious add-ons. And for those who need performance, it also seems likely that Newisys will consider using small form factor SAS drives in a variant of the NA-1400 at some point down the road.

Over on the server side of the Newisys house, the Horus server chipset, which Newisys announced was in development in August 2004, continues to wind its way through the development process toward production. "Horus is doing well," says Doug Norton, director of server products marketing at Newisys. In fact, one of the interesting things that will be shown at the Supercomputing 2005 HPC industry show in Seattle, Wash., in mid-November is a 16-socket, dual core Horus-based server. Norton says that a 32-socket machine is up and running in the Newisys labs in Austin, Texas, with an early rev of the Horus chipset. "We're pretty excited about this." This is the A1 silicon, and the B0 version of the silicon, which will be the first commercial iteration of the Horus chipset, will be taped out at the end of 2005 if all goes well, says Norton. While he can't come out and say this, it is no coincidence that Horus will be ready to rock when the Opteron Rev F chips--these are the ones that support DDR2 main memory, possibly 1.2 GHz or 1.4 GHz bi-directional HyperTransport buses (up from the current 1 GHz HyperTransport used in the Rev E Opterons), a presumably more sophisticated dual-core chip design (this will be AMD's second pass at this, and vendors always make tweaks to improve yields and performance), and the "Pacifica" virtualization and "Presidio" security extensions.

Norton says that Newisys can build a 32-socket, 64-core Opteron box with the Horus chipset, and the company is looking forward to having a bunch of OEMs pick up the box. Without naming names, he says that one server maker is working with Newisys now, and there are "lots of others sniffing around." What Newisys certainly doesn't want to do is repeat the experience that Unisys had when it created the ES7000 Xeon-based (and eventually Itanium-based servers). At first, Compaq, Hewlett-Packard, and Dell all signed up to resell the box at the turn of the millennium, but then they all backed out for complicated reasons. That said, the Horus chipset is so compelling, in theory, and the people who designed it were among the smartest systems designers in the world, so if Horus performs as promised, someone is going to pick it up. And if the tier one and tier two players don't, then they just let a tier three player graduate to a higher game.

In the meantime, as the finishing touches get put on the Horus designs, Newisys is readying a kicker to its 2100 dual-socket Opteron box. This server, which is code-named "Hendrix," is a two-socket, 1U Opteron server aimed at the high performance computing market. It will support current single- and dual-core Opteron processors, PCI-X and PCI Express peripheral slots, and SATA drives standard with SAS drives optional. It is reasonable to assume that eventually, Newisys will create variants of the Hendrix box that uses the Rev F Opterons, and it is also reasonable to guess that Newisys is cooking up a kicker to its four-socket 4300 server as well that uses either the current Opterons or the Rev F Opterons, too. The Hendrix server is expected to ship early next year, and others will probably follow as we get closer to the Rev F Opteron launch date.

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