Intel Certifies Solaris on Its Carrier-Grade Servers

Published: July 19, 2007

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Chip maker Intel has for many years also been a supplier of so-called white-box servers that other vendors take in on a OEM basis or that large customers deploying thousands of servers can buy directly from the company and install with the assistance of Intel's vast partner network. So it is with Intel's carrier-grade server products, which are based on its own processors and chipsets. The latest machines in this product line have just been certified to run Sun Microsystems' Solaris Unix variant.

Back in January, the top brass at Intel and Sun got together to announce an alliance between the two companies, which had been at war both directly and indirectly in the server space and operating system space for many years. Under that agreement, Sun agreed to use Intel's 64-bit Xeon chips in servers and workstations alongside machines based on Advanced Micro Devices' Opteron processors, while the two agreed to collaborate to make Solaris, Java, and other middleware and development tool software work well on Xeons. Sun is making optimizations in the Solaris scheduler and memory algorithms to map to Xeons, and is making use of power-throttling features such as Demand Based Switching in the chips.

Solaris got the nod from Intel as the strategic, mission-critical Unix for Intel's Xeon processors. Of course, it is the only mainstream, commercial-class Unix available on X64 processors, so being given that mantel by Intel did not really mean much. Still, with Hewlett-Packard's HP-UX relegated to Intel Itanium and IBM's AIX running only on its own Power chips, being on X64 processors from both Intel and AMD is a significant market advantage, and that is why Intel gave it the nod. With something north of 8 million downloads of Solaris 10 in the past two and a half years, Intel and AMD have to pay attention to Solaris.

But there is a better reason to pay particular attention to Solaris when it comes to carrier-grade servers installed by telecom companies and service providers and used by network equipment providers. Sun used to own that space, and even after incursions of X86 and X64 servers running carrier-grade Linux, Sun still has a vast installed base of Sparc servers installed at these customers.

Two Intel servers have been certified to run Solaris 10. They have silly names. The Carrier Grade Rack Mount Server TIGW1U is a 20-inch deep rack server that is in a form factor suitable for telcos that was announced last month by Intel; this machine uses Intel's dual-core "Woodcrest" Xeon 5100 processors but does not yet support the quad-core "Clovertown" Xeon 5300s. The TIGW1U is NEBS compliant, which means it meets the ruggedized requirements of the telco industry, and it comes in AC and DC variants. (Telcos use DC power for the phone networks, since it can run on low voltage and supply its own power along with the signals on the wire.) This server costs $1,898 in a base configuration.

The second server to be certified by Intel to run Solaris 10 is the NetStructure MCPBL0050, which is a blade server that fits into the ACTA blade form factor created by the telecom industry because they have enough might to make server makers adhere to their standards. (Unlike the enterprise blade server market, which has incompatible blade interfaces from every vendor.) This ACTA blade supports Intel's low-voltage Xeon 5138 processors, and the blade, configured with memory and storage, has a total power usage of under 200 watts. This blade is expected to ship in the third quarter, and represents Intel's fifth generation of ACTA blades. When NetStructure Xeon blade ships, Solaris will be certified on it; it is expected to cost $5,169 when it ships.

With Sun wanting to attack the telco, service provider, and NEP space with its own blade servers, rack servers, and Netra carrier-grade servers, it may seem to be a little counter-intuitive for Sun to be enthusiastic about Intel and its partners being able to peddle Xeon-based servers against whatever Sun's own system engineers are working on. (And Sun is definitely working on its own Xeon-based products for this market, says Herb Hinstoff, director of Solaris Business Management at Sun.) But Intel's Embedded Communications Group has over 3,000 of its own customers in more than 30 market segments, including applications for print imaging, medical imaging and testing, military and aerospace, IPTV, industrial control, and a bunch of other embedded industries. Sun wants Solaris in there, generating services and support revenues, every bit as much as it wants hardware sales. The former is probably, over the long haul, capable of delivering more profits. Solaris is estimated to generate in excess of $1 billion a year in sales for Sun, and software is generally a lot more profitable for any IT vendor than hardware.

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