Fujitsu, Microsoft Stress Collaboration on Itanium Servers

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

In January 2003, Japanese server maker Fujitsu announced a bit surprisingly that it was partnering with Intel to create a line of mainframe-class servers that used 32-bit Xeon and 64-bit Itanium processors. This was surprising in as much as Fujitsu and its server partner, Siemens of Germany, had co-developed the PrimePower line of Sparc clone servers supporting the Solaris variant of Unix to attack the enterprise server market. This week, these future "Pleiades" Itanium servers got another unexpected feature: backing from Microsoft.

When Fujitsu announced the agreement with Intel 18 months ago to build high-end X86 servers, the company did not say a whole lot. But they were very clear that these machines would initially only support Linux, which bears some affinity with the Unix market that the Fujitsu-Siemens partnership understands quite well. And while Fujitsu-Siemens has a large and very aggressive Windows-based server business in Europe and Japan, the company said when the Pleiades machines were first described that Windows support would only come after Linux support was rolled out.

In Tokyo this week, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and Fujitsu chairman Naoyuki Akikusa announced a new global alliance that has no doubt been enabled by the fact that Fujitsu's own Sparc platform rival and Solaris partner, Sun Microsystems, buried the hatchet with its archrival Microsoft in a $2 billion settlement of outstanding antitrust lawsuits a few months ago. Under that alliance, Microsoft and Fujitsu will be collaborating to make the current Windows Server 2003 perform and scale well on the Pleiades servers, and will similarly work together to make sure that the future Windows "Longhorn" kicker to Windows 2003 runs like a top on the Pleiades boxes. In a statement released by Fujitsu, the two companies reckon that Fujitsu-Siemens can rake in 800 billion yen (that's about $7.4 billion) in worldwide sales in its Windows platform business, including the future Pleiades machines as well as the kickers to the current Primergy Xeon and Itanium machines.

As part of the agreement, Fujitsu-Siemens will support Microsoft's .NET Framework and .NET-enabled middleware and systems software servers on the Pleiades boxes, and will make .NET mesh well with Fujitsu's own TRIOLE systems management strategy, which seeks to partner with companies on Windows, Unix, and Linux platforms to deliver virtualization, automation, and templates for installing and software and managing processes to make complex systems (like the ones Fujitsu-Siemens sells worldwide) easier and cheaper to manage. The key to TRIOLE is something Fujitsu has developed in Japan called Platform Integration (PI) templates, which allow Fujitsu to pre-integrate various components on the servers it sells and thus ship a pre-configured and manageable system to customers. A month ago, Fujitsu announced a PI Center in Japan that has created a few dozen of these PI templates for many of its biggest Japanese customers, and is now making these available to Fujitsu-Siemens customers and partners worldwide in an effort to foster more templates covering more vertical markets and system configurations.

The details on TRIOLE are a bit vague, but under the Microsoft alliance, the two companies will set up a joint engineering support team at Microsoft's campus in Redmond, Washington to port Windows Server 2003 and Longhorn to the Pleiades platforms; this will be set up in the second half of 2004. They are also working to improve the interoperability of Fujitsu's own application development tools with Microsoft's own .NET infrastructure such that it is easier to interoperate or port applications running on Solaris and other proprietary platforms to Windows machines like the Pleiades. Specifically, Fujitsu wants Microsoft's help in evolving its NetCOBOL and Interstage Business Application Manager (which technically support .NET) so they can fit into the future Longhorn world. The two also plan to integrate Microsoft Operations Manager and Fujitsu's own Systemwalker system management tools; the exact nature of this integration remains unclear. The agreement also calls for Microsoft and Fujitsu to work together to tune the future SQL Server 2005, add in software support for system reliability features that Fujitsu is moving from its PrimePower line into the Pleiades machines, enhance Microsoft's system management tools so they are more like the sophisticated tracing tools in Solaris and can handle dynamic partitions like Solaris has and like Microsoft will eventually deliver in its Windows platform.

After making that January 2003 announcement, there was plenty of noise about how Fujitsu-Siemens would eventually abandon its Sparc development, but now that Sun has tapped Fujitsu to make a fair portion of its future Sparc-based servers (particularly those like the high-end, monolithic machines like the PrimePower 1500s and 2500s, which significantly outperform Sun's own UltraSparc servers) in an agreement the two announced in early June, Fujitsu-Siemens is clearly not going to walk away from the Sparc market, but wants to attack the market for big Sparc and Windows boxes.

Fujitsu said this week that it is on track to deliver the Pleiades servers in the first half of 2005 using Itanium processors. (This was the first time the company referred to the machines by this code-name.) In the thin data I have seen, the Pleiades box has eight cell boards with four processors each per board; it has been demonstrated in Japan running Linux. Back in January 2003, Fujitsu said that the Pleiades machines would use both Xeon and Itanium processors, but the expectation was that the Xeon machines would only scale to 32 or maybe 64 processors, while eventually the Itanium machines would scale to the same 128-way heights as the current PrimePower Unix servers. Fujitsu is expected to support the future "Madison" 9MB Itanium 2s, which will run at 1.6 GHz, 1.7 GHz, and 1.8 GHz, as well as the future dual-core "Montecito" Itanium chip, which will have a 24 MB L3 cache and will probably run at around 2 GHz.

With the Xeons now supporting 64-bit processing, Fujitsu-Siemens has a lot of options for building big iron. Just because Microsoft and Fujitsu were talking about Itanium yesterday does not mean there will not be big Xeon-EM64T boxes out there next year with the Pleiades label on them. In fact, the original plan announced in January 2003 was for the Xeon-based servers (which were expected to be only 32-bit at the time, but which clearly had 64-bit support in their cores even back then) to come out by the end of the 2004. Only time will tell what Fujitsu-Siemens will actually do. Neither Microsoft nor Fujitsu are telling this week; that is for sure.