The OpenPower 710 will enable IBM to push Linux-on-Power a lot more effectively than the initial four-way OpenPower 720 server did. The reason why is that it is better targeted at two-way and four-way Wintel and Lintel servers in terms of price and performance.
The OpenPower 710 comes in two flavors, one with a single 1.65GHz Power5 core activated and the other with two cores activated. The Power5 chip is a dual-core design with a shared, on-chip L2 cache memory; IBM currently offers Power5 chips running at 1.5GHz and 1.65GHz in single-chip modules and at 1.65GHz and 1.9GHz in multichip modules (the latter being used in high-end enterprise servers).
IBM would love to get perfect yield on every Power5 chip, with both cores and the L2 cache memory all working properly. But where Murphy’s Law – what can go wrong does go wrong – meets Moore’s Law – you can cut the size of a transistor in half every 18 months or so – you can’t get anything even close to perfect yield on a big, dual-core chip.
If IBM were smart – and it is in this case -, when it tests a Power5 chip and finds that one core works well even when the other does not, it would find a use for that Power5 chip with only one core working. In the past, such Power4 chips ended up in RISC workstations and entry Unix servers. With the Power5, IBM is putting such chips in a single-core OpenPower 710 server running Linux.
For customers who want a bit more oomph in their Linux server, IBM is also offering a version of the OpenPower 710 with a fully capable, dual-core Power5 chip with both cores activated. Joe Doria, program director for Linux on Power at IBM, says that the company will also offer upgrades from the single-core to the dual-core versions, but that this is not obviously – just a matter of turning a core on – as in other OpenPower, eServer p5, or eServer i5 servers – since the second core in the entry machine is a dud.
The OpenPower 710 comes in a 2U cabinet, the same size as most expandable two-way servers these days. Doria says that IBM has no plans to try to push the OpenPowers down to a 1U form factor, as many infrastructure machines are today, because of the limited expandability that 1U servers offer to commercial customers.
The OpenPower 710 comes with only 1.65GHz cores, and offers from 1GB to 32GB of main memory. It has three PCI-X slots -which are not hot-pluggable, like its older sibling, the OpenPower 720, does. The machine has four hot-plug disk bays (which is a lot for a 2U server), and does not offer support for external I/O drawers like the OpenPower 720 does. With those drawers, the OpenPower 720 can support up to 15.2TB of directly attached disk capacity.
The OpenPower 720, which comes in a 4U chassis, supports up to four Power5 cores (two physical chips) and up to 64GB of main memory. Both the OpenPower 710 and 720 have dual Gigabit Ethernet ports and a two-channel Ultra320 SCSI controller.
While IBM sold the OpenPower 720 with one, two, or four Power5 cores activated, the fact that it was a four-core server actually hindered it in some markets. For instance, a single core OpenPower 710 or 720 can do about the same work as a two-way Xeon server, but software pricing on programs such as Oracle Corp’s 10g database are based on the full expandability, in terms of CPU count, of the server, as well as the number of physical CPUs in the box. So, for instance, Oracle 10g Standard Edition One costs $4,995 per processor, but it is only available for servers that support a maximum of two processors or cores.
So a single-core OpenPower 720, which can expand to four cores, would have to run Oracle 10g Standard Edition, which costs $15,000 per activated core. That $10,000 difference in the price of the database is more than the cost of the server–and by a long shot.
The uniprocessor version of the OpenPower 710 comes with a base 1 GB of main memory and a 73 GB SCSI disk; it costs $3,449. The two-way version with the same base memory and disk costs $3,999. IBM was not able to provide upgrade pricing between the two models at press time.
Both machines will be available February 18 and have been certified to run Red Hat Inc’s Enterprise Linux Server 3 Update 3 and Novell Inc’s SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9. Doria says that IBM has no plans to certify Turbolinux, Mandrakesoft, or other Linux distributions on any of the OpenPowers. He says that some 900 Linux-X86 applications have been ported to the Power platform to date, which is an increase of 250 since the OpenPower 720 was launched in September.
Like the other Power5-based servers, the OpenPower 710 supports IBM’s Virtualization Engine logical partitioning, which allows up to 10 partitions, each with its own instance of Linux, to run on a single physical core. The Virtualization Engine hypervisor costs $1,000 on the OpenPower 710, plus $186 per activated CPU.
Doria says that the high performance of the Power5 chip, plus the virtualization capability – which allows customers to consolidate many physical servers on a single OpenPower 710, while at the same time driving up the utilization of that machine -will make the box a compelling offering for the aging base of vintage entry Unix servers deployed at financial, telecommunications, and service provider companies. In other words, like everyone else, IBM is gunning for the entry Unix server business of Sun Microsystems Inc.
