By William Fellows
Compaq Computer Corp will be giving its Alpha RISC-based enterprise and Unix product strategies a new lick of paint this week, beginning with the introduction of a much-previewed four- way ES40 server using 500MHZ Alpha 21264 CPUs.
The Regatta-class box will ship this quarter with Tru64 Unix, OpenVMS, or Windows NT or as a bare bones platform enabling customers to have Linux fitted by one of the open source OS shops. The Linux-ready configuration starts at $24,000 as a uniprocessor with 512Mb RAM, 4Gb disk and 4Mb cache. Tru64 Unix versions start at $30,000. It appears aggressively priced considering a two-way DS20 server with 128Mb of main memory and 4Gb of disk costs $19,000. A new entry-level DS10 server, which Compaq terms the WebBrick, uses one or two of the Alphas and is also due this quarter. It comes in for the AlphaServer 800. The Enterprise ES40 is the follow-on to the two-way ES20. The VS10 VMSstation is due by mid-year. Compaq says it will begin offering call center support for Linux on its servers within 90 days.
Later this year its Tru64 Fortran and C compilers and runtime libraries will be available for Linux-on-Alpha. The company claims early work indicates its Fortran for Linux on AlphaServers performs floating point operations twice as fast as code generated by the g77 compiler for Linux on AlphaServers. It says it will also port Linux libraries to Tru64 for Linux application hosting on Tru64.
Compaq is also moving Alphas into its WinTel ProLiant line of PC servers this summer in a bid to supercharge Windows NT database performance. The two-way Catamaran and four-way Schooner servers are due by mid-year. The eight-way Python is due mid mid-2000 with Diamondback, Cobra, Copperhead models to follow. Unlike Dell Computer Corp, Compaq does not plan to sell systems fitted with the Windows 2000 beta 3, but it is supposed to show Win64 running on some clustered NT servers next week.
The next-generation WildFire servers with switched CPU interconnects for ccNUMA-style memory sharing using 767MHz 21264 are slated to be available by the end of the year. Compaq says it plans to develop system components, including memory and disk that can be shared across the lines.
Compaq will begin offering version 5.0 of its Tru64 Unix operating system later this month and TruCluster system software in the summer for connecting Unix servers utilizing its Memory Channel interconnect. TruCluster 5.0 includes a common root file system enabling multiple tasks – including application installation, disk configuration and authentication – to be carried out just once and applied to any system in the cluster. It will also include a common event management service and a new Java application that can be used to administer all systems management functions. The company claims multiple applications can run within separate workload partitions under a single copy of the operating system. The current TruCluster 1.6 release is claimed to failover in 20 seconds. Compaq believes the file system can save up to 40% of systems management and training costs. Two ES40 servers clustered with the new software will cost from $50,000 to $100,000.
Tru64 5.0 will support 28Gb of main memory and over 10Tb of storage on a single server; it will also include I/O performance improvements made possible through the addition of multiple I/O path support. Future version 5 releases will offer 99.999% availability (compared to 5.0’s 99.99% availability), and support for Intel’s 64-bit IA-64 Merced chip, due in mid-2000. The China National Computer Software and Technology Service Corp – and ISV and integrator – is going to develop a local language version of Tru64 (nee Digital Unix) called Cosix64.
TruCluster V5.0 supports a single system image for clustered Alphas, improved cluster management and a new cluster file system, all of which add up to substantial fault tolerance improvements. Tru64 Unix offers application partitioning where resources for applications within a single workspace can be allocated within a single OS instance. Hardware partitioning – physical separation of components within a system – can be achieved using multiple operating systems; Tru64, OpenVMS and NT. Adaptive partitioned multiprocessing, the ability to partition system resources with software in order to allow multiple operating systems to execute within a single hardware partition can currently only be achieved using OpenVMS Galaxy clustering. TruCluster 5.0 costs from $5,000; Tru65 5.0 starts at $2,500.
Compaq says the task of integrating TruCluster with its Tandem unit’s NonStop clustering mechanism begins in earnest with release 6.0 of TruClusters which will support process pairing for the Tandem technology. In the meantime it will finish porting NonStop clusters to Santa Cruz Operation Inc’s UnixWare. Moreover Compaq says it will also roll them over to the AIX-based Montery64 being developed by SCO, IBM and Sequent.
