The delay in the launch of the xSeries 450 was due to a lot of factors – some of them internal politics at IBM – but can be officially chalked up to the rollout of Microsoft Corp’s Windows Server 2003, which supports the 64-bit Itanium chips. This doesn’t exactly add up, when IBM says it is aiming its Itanium machines at the technical computing market, which increasingly favors Linux. Linux has long since run on the Itanium 2 processors.
So it goes in the Kremlinesque world of servers and platforms. The important thing for IBM, its customers, and its relationship with Intel, which obviously wants Big Blue to push Itanium (and not under a rug, either), is that the xSeries 450 is out the door. The truth be told, the bulk of the applications that are available, in production not in beta, are in the HPC, design automation, and data mining areas. The Itanium ecosystem does not include all the popular production databases -IBM’s DB2 and Oracle’s 9i are still beta products, Microsoft is only now shipping SQL Server 2000 for Itanium, and the open source MySQL database has been in production for a while. You can’t blame IBM for not being thrilled with the prospect of rolling out a product in 160 countries with so few commercial applications available on it.
The xSeries 450 machine uses a 64-bit version of IBM’s own Summit Extended X Architecture (EXA) chipset, which is also used in the Vigil xSeries 440 servers that closely resemble the new xSeries 450. The xSeries 440, which debuted as a four-way box in March 2002, supports the 32-bit Foster and Gallatin Pentium 4 Xeon MP processors. The Summit chipset supports four scalability ports that allow NUMA clustering of four-ways to create servers with 8, 12, or 16 processors in a single system image. Throughout 2002, IBM increased the scaleability of the xSeries 440, finishing the year with the 16-way machines.
Deepak Advani, vice president of high-end systems for IBM’s xSeries unit, says the company is seeing a lot of tire kickers on these 16-way machines, and says further that IBM is committed to delivering 32-processor Summit machines at some point in the future. It’s unclear if this future xSeries 445 will use eight-way motherboards and have only four scaleability ports, or if it will use four-way boards and have double the current number of ports supported. The latter method might allow customers to preserve more of their existing investments in xSeries 440 technology. The former might be easier to accomplish.
The xSeries 450 is not IBM’s first Itanium-based machine. Prior to the Itanium launch back in May 2001, IBM committed to delivering dual-processor workstations and servers based on Intel’s two-way Big Sur Merced motherboards, and said it would deliver bigger servers using the four-way Lion Merced motherboards. IBM debuted the IntelliStation Z Pro workstation running Windows XP and Linux using the Big Sur motherboards right after Merced came out, and launched a four-way server called the xSeries 380 using the Lion motherboards in late June 2001 for Red Hat Linux 7.1, followed by a version of the xSeries 380 supporting Windows 2000 Advanced Server Limited Edition in late August 2001. This xSeries 380 supported up to 64GB of main memory, which is a lot of memory for a four-way box. IBM did not deliver a two-way Merced server, and has not delivered a two-way machine using the McKinley chip and is not expected to. Like other vendors, IBM considered the Big Sur and Lion machines as test and development boxes, unsuited for production work because of the dearth of software for them.
After Intel rolls out the Madison 1.5GHz Itanium 2 processors sometime in the middle of this year, IBM says it will extend the xSeries 450 with a revamped version of the Summit chipset, called EXA-2. This second-generation EXA chipset will also be used to create the 32-way Xeon MP machine, which is expected to be sold as the xSeries 445. Whether or not IBM will go full tilt boogie and create a 32-way Itanium machine remains to be seen. But it clearly has the capability to make the hardware, and Windows Server 2003 has the capability to handle such NUMA clustering. The current Linux implementation does not really support NUMA clustering, which is a problem. Given this fact and the fact that IBM is pushing the xSeries 450 Itanium servers into accounts that need the floating point performance and big main memories that are necessary for technical workloads and data warehousing, supporting large NUMA configurations may not be all that useful for Linux customers, unless they use virtual machine partitioning like IBM offers through partner VMWare.
It will be interesting to see what IBM does, particularly because of self-impact issues that any scaleable Itanium server has on its zSeries mainframes and pSeries and iSeries midrange machines. If the ecosystem for the Itanium develops and customers start asking for it, you can bet IBM will sell it. It will also be interesting to see what IBM does with its AMD Opteron-based machines and how it compares and contrasts them with its Itanium servers as well as its native Power-based offerings.
The xSeries 450 supports both the 900MHz/1.5MB L3 cache and 1. GHz/3MB L3 cache. It only has 200MHz double-pumped front side buses (which are wider than the 32-bit buses in the other Summit machines, which result in big bandwidth even though the bus is slow compared to the quad-pumped buses available today on Xeon MP machines). The machine also only supports up to 40GB of DDR SDRAM main memory, down from 64GB in the xSeries 380. The xSeries 450 has six PCI-X slots, and an expansion port that can accommodate another dozen PCI-X slots. The machine comes in a 4U form factor, and can house two 73GB disk drives for local storage. A base machine comes with a single 900MHz Itanium 2 processor and 1GB of main memory; it sells for $25,999. A four-way box using the 1GHz McKinley chips and having 8GB of main memory sells for $64,595.
Source: Computerwire
