Unisys ES7000 inherits more mainframe features
As more companies look to shave costs by consolidating servers or by moving legacy applications onto more cost effective hardware, the Intel option has very often represented too much of a downsizing or "off sizing" from industrial strength performance, reliability, availability, and serviceability (RAS).
To tackle the performance issues, some vendors pack as many Intel processors as they can fit into refrigerator-sized systems. However, such Intel-based systems have still been lagging in mainframe-like RAS features. To address those needs, big-iron vendors have been working frantically to trickle RAS technologies from their mainframes into their high-end Intel systems.
IBM's recent autonomic computing overtures, formerly discussed under the auspices of its Project Eliza, has probably been the most visible and heavily marketed of these efforts. But to improve the allure of its high-end Intel offerings, Unisys is here at Gartner Spring Symposium/ITxpo 2003 releasing details of the fortifications it has made to its own trickle-down technology known as Server Sentinel.
With as many as 32 Intel Xeon processors in its ES7000 servers, Unisys has been unique among solution providers trying to make Intel-targeted downsizing operations look more like rightsizing. Using its proprietary Cellular MultiProcessing (CMP) chipset, Unisys says, it has to date been the only company to deliver a 32-way system based on Intel's 32-bit Xeon processor. Other vendors, including IBM, HP, and Fujitsu, have been working on high-end Intel systems, but their 32-bit offerings haven't yet scaled to the same 32-processor threshold that the ES7000s have. (Those vendors' 64-bit offerings--based on Itanium 2 or other RISC architectures--target a different set of applications.)
For IT managers targeting 32-bit Windows, online transaction processing benchmark (TPC-C) results from the Transaction Processing Council show that the ES7000 is more than just the only 32-bit offering among the top 10 non-clustered performers. At $11.59 per tpmC, the ES7000 also offers the best price/performance of the top ten. The only top ten performers currently within a stone's throw of ES7000's number are two systems from NEC-- and both are based on 64-bit Windows running on Intel's 64-bit Itanium 2.
Recognizing that performance and price/performance aren't the only concerns of IT managers, Unisys is releasing version 2.0 of its Server Sentinel management utility. A copy Server Sentinel ships with all ES7000 servers. The new release appears to include several worthwhile mainframe-like fortifications and is timed with the announcement of three a la carte management options that that address server consolidation, resource management, and SQL server optimizations. Each option costs $1,000 per supported processor.
Based on what I heard from Unisys project manager Rick Loechler, Server Sentinel 2.0's most significant advance over its predecessor is the ability to anticipate a failure.
"For the most part," said Loechler, "the previous version of Server Sentinel reacted to specific diagnostic thresholds and, generally speaking, once one of those thresholds was crossed, something had failed or was very close to it. Where Server Sentinel 2.0 is different is that it collects and analyzes a significant amount of diagnostic data on an ongoing basis and it tries to spot trends that might be early warnings that something is about to go wrong. This gives Server Sentinel more time to gracefully engage a failover process in a way that eliminates the potential loss of data that might otherwise result if the failover was delayed until after the [aforementioned] thresholds were crossed."
What is Sever Sentinel looking for? Loechler said "We watch for degradation in disk throughput over time, process handle leaks, memory leaks or errors, CPU utilization, and page fault rates. Based on the testing we've done, we know what the early indicators look like and have incorporated that knowledge into Server Sentinel."
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The SQL Server optimization module is likewise based on heuristics and other data collected during Unisys testing and profiling processes. "The SQL module has two parts," said Schultz. "First, an optimizer that collects data about SQL Sever running in our CMP environment. Second, it analyzes that data and compares it with our lab data, and then recommends specific changes to the database administrator (DBA) to improve performance. It looks at the configuration settings of both the database and Windows and then at some system data like the CMP configuration settings, memory, I/O, processor, and network bottleneck conditions. The DBA can then make adjustments that result in database optimization."
Whereas other vendors, even Microsoft, condone physical system clustering as a means of scaling performance, Unisys officials advocate, instead, the clustering of partitions within the same physical system as a means of improving performance. According to the Unisys philosophy, Windows clusters are useful strictly for the purposes of failover and fault tolerance, but not for performance scaling. Typical configurations in fault tolerant configurations will involve two nodes: a primary node that is running the production applications and a passive mode that is standing by in the event that Server Sentinel detects a threat to the primary node's overall integrity.
This doesn't mean, however, that you should squeeze all of your applications into one physical ES7000 system. The consolidation module should be able to identify how many ES7000 servers you'll need to complete your consolidation, and what their configurations should be. According to company officials, a single instance of Server Sentinel works across these servers and the resource management module can move resources within one physical primary server as well as between servers.
ES7000s range in configuration from eight to 32 processors (in increments of eight) and in price from $100,000 to $750,000. However, the tested configuration currently under review by the Transaction Processing Council had a sticker price of $2,715,310. The prices supplied by company officials do not include a storage system like Unisys' ESM 7900 that was part of the test configuration. If the systems seem a little rich for your blood, stay tuned for some announcements in early April. Unisys spokesperson Stephen Holzman said the company will introduce several Intel-based low to mid-range offerings on April 7. Although no specifics were available, my guess is we'll see systems that scale from one to eight processors (instead of eight to 32) to compete against similar offerings from Dell, HP, and IBM. Given Server Sentinel's connection to Unisys proprietary CMP chipset found in the ES7000s, it's likely that the new systems will also have the CMP chipset to guarantee that existing Server Sentinel users can manage the new systems as well. IBM takes a similar approach by incorporating into its family of servers the proprietary Enterprise X-Architecture chipset, which,like Unisys' Server Sentinel and CMP, is tightly integrated with IBM's Director management platform.
Unisys says the ES7000 supports Linux as well, but that the Server Sentinel software, which I consider an important component of the solution, does not. Like other Itanium 2-based solution providers, Unisys also has an Itanium 2 offering, but the new release of Server Sentinel will not support it until this summer.
Is Unisys on your radar, or are you sticking with companies like IBM and HP? What does your enterprise class Intel configuration look like? Share your thoughts with your fellow readers using ZDNet's TalkBack below, or write to me at david.berlind@cnet.com.