Fujitsu-Siemens Finally Opts for Opteron in Servers

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

With PrimePower servers sporting its own Sparc 64 processors, a reseller agreement with Sun Microsystems to sell its UltraSparc servers, a Xeon-based Primergy server product line, and the new Itanium-based PrimeQuest servers, you might think that the last thing in the world that the Fujitsu Siemens partnership would need is another chip architecture to sell and support. But the server market is a complex one, and there is demand in certain circles for AMD's 64-bit Opteron processors.

And that is why Fujitsu-Siemens has launched two new Opteron-based servers after saying it would not do that for a number of years. The partnership has nothing against the Opteron; it has sold Opteron processors in its two-socket Celsius workstations for some time, in fact. It just likes to keep as simple of a product line as possible in the server market.

Still, the benefits of the Opteron chip in terms of low energy consumption and better performance compared to Pentium and Xeon processors from Intel are well known. Fujitsu-Siemens was one of the holdouts that did not offer support for the Opteron processors in its own machines. As a major Sparc server vendor and a strong proponent of the Solaris Unix variant, Fujitsu-Siemens could, of course, had just became a reseller of Sun's new "Galaxy" X2100, X4100 and X4200 Opteron servers, which were announced a few months ago. But Fujitsu-Siemens likes to do its own engineering sometimes, and that is why it has created its own low-end Opteron-based rack server that are officially aimed at grid computing and high performance computing markets--the same niche target that IBM said it is trying to hit with its own Opteron-based eServer 325 and eServer 326 rack servers. Fujitsu-Siemens has also created a two-socket blade server that used the HyperTransport links of the Opteron design and its Direct Connect Architecture to allow SMP scalability across individual blades within a blade chassis. Both machines will be sold in the Primergy product line, says Richard McCormack, senior vice president of product and solutions marketing at Fujitsu Computer Systems, the North American unit of the Fujitsu-Siemens partnership.

Smart alecks like me are always badgering IT executives like McCormack about when they will support any new technology, and Dell and Fujitsu-Siemens were noteworthy in that they are among the top five server vendors but they did not support Opteron like the other three--IBM, Sun, and Hewlett-Packard--did. McCormack is one of the more lively marketing guys among his peers, and he takes such razzing in stride, and in talking about Fujitsu-Siemens' capitulation to market forces to put Opterons in at least some of its servers, he took it all in stride. "We're really happy to have done it," he explains, and he talked about how Fujitsu-Siemens supports one of the broadest collections of server technologies in the world. "The bottom line is we have chosen to put the Opteron in our Primergy servers." The question now, of course, is how far will Fujitsu-Siemens push Opteron. Sun is basing its low-end and midrange business on Opterons, and HP has a pretty broad portfolio of ProLiant servers using Opteron. IBM has essentially one machine, the eServer 326, and one IntelliStation workstation, the A Pro. Fujitsu-Siemens is testing the waters with Opteron, and is not going to revamp the Primergy line to run Opterons. McCormack points out that while the company has its own Sparc chips and a strong partnership with Sun, it also has a similarly strong partnership with Intel (as does HP and, to a lesser extent, IBM).

The Primergy RX220 rack server is a 1U, two-socket server that can use either single- or dual-core Opterons. The details are a bit sketchy on this box, but it currently supports 16 GB of main memory using 2 GB DIMMs and will support 32 GB of main memory when 4 GB DIMMs become available. It's hard to say for sure, but this machine looks like a variant of the 64-bit Xeon DP server that Fujitsu-Siemens already sells, the RX200 S2, which puts two Xeon DPs, two mirrored 300 GB disks, 16 GB of main memory, two Gigabit Ethernet LAN ports, and redundant power in a 1U box. The Primergy RX220 Opteron machine is available immediately in Europe and will be available in December in North America; it has a base price of $1,700.

The new Primergy BX630 Opteron-based blade server is perhaps a more interesting box (although Fujitsu-Siemens could sell a lot of those pizza box RX220s to HPC customers). The BX600 blade chassis was designed to support either 10 two-socket Xeon DP blade servers or five four-socket Xeon MP blade servers in a 7U rack-mounted blade server chassis. Starting in November, Fujitsu Siemens will ship a new two-socket Opteron 200 blade and a new four-socket Opteron 800 blade, and customers will be able to mix and match these with Xeon-based blade servers in the same chassis. All of these blades have two hot-plug disk drives and one Gigabit Ethernet link for each processor socket, regardless of whether they are Xeon or Opteron blades.

The BX620 Xeon DP blade supports single-core Xeons running at between 2.8 GHz and 3.8 GHz and up to 12 GB of main memory, and because it supports the Intel 7520 chipset, it can in theory support the dual-core "Paxville" Xeon DP chips that Intel is just starting to deliver. The BX660 is based on older 32-bit Xeon MP processors running at 2.2 GHz to 2.7 GHz using the ServerWorks GC LE chipset; it supports only 16 GB of main memory. Microsoft's Windows and Red Hat's and Novell's Linuxes are officially supported on these blades, although NetWare, Solaris, SCO Unix, and the BSD Unixes could, in theory, be supported. The BX630 blade comes in two flavors. The two-socket variant can support single-core Opteron 200 processors running at 2 GHz or 2.4 GHz and dual-core Opteron 200s or dual-core Opteron 800s running at 1.8 GHz, 2 GHz, and 2.2 GHz. It supports up to 16 GB today, and will support 32 GB as soon as 4 GB DIMMs are ready. This blade server uses AMD's Thor chipset, which appears to be a next-generation AMD chipset. Only Windows 2003 and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 are supported on this blade. The BX630 blade also comes in a quad-socket configuration that only supports the dual-core Opteron 800s running at 1.8 GHz, 2 GHz, and 2.2 GHz. This blade also uses the AMD Thor chipset, and it will support 32 GB of memory for those four sockets and eight cores, with up to 64 GB possible when those fatter DDR-400 DIMMs come to market. This blade also supports only Window 2003 and SLES 9.

The interesting bit with the new Opteron blade server is that customers who buy the two-socket Opteron blades can buy a special cable from Fujitsu-Siemens that allows the HyperTransport links to be connected, turning a two physical two-socket SMP servers (possibly each with four active Opteron cores) into a single, logical four-socket SMP server (possibly with as many as eight active cores). In short, if you need a bigger blade, you don't have to swap out your two-socket blades for four-socket blades; you can make on one the fly. By the way, McCormack says that the Thor chipset can lash up to four blades together to create a logical eight-socket SMP, but that Fujitsu-Siemens is just starting out with lashing two boards together.

The Primergy BX630 blades will be available in November, and they will have a base price of $2,350.

It will be interesting to see if Fujitsu-Siemens' customers pressure it to support Solaris 10 on its new Opteron boxes. So far, Solaris has been verboten on Primergy machines. If enough customers ask for Solaris support, Fujitsu-Siemens will do it. Ditto for the Xeon-based machines in the Primergy line, too.