Big Blue planning fall RS/6000 bash

SOMERS, N.Y. - In an effort to become a more serious contender in the Unix-powered symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) market, IBM is readying a high-end RS/6000 system powered by 24 processors.

The S80 Enterprise Server, scheduled to be announced in October, will be driven by a new version of IBM's Unix derivative, AIX, which is said to boast transaction-processing and caching improvements.

With the S80, IBM hopes to fill out its Unix hardware line and go head-to-head with servers such as the Sun Enterprise 6500 and 10000, as well as V-class machines from Hewlett-Packard.

"Pushing SMP to this level is a watershed for IBM," says Jean Bozman, an analyst with International Data Corp. (IDC), a market research firm in Framingham, Mass.

IBM says the S80 is the successor to the S70 Advanced, which can be upgraded to S80 status by swapping out CPUs. While the official announcement is slated for October, the S80 could start shipping next month.

It will be possible to configure the box with up to 24 PowerPC Pulsar processors - double the number of the S70 Advanced. IBM claims that unlike its SMP competitors, each of the S80's processors can be exploited to virtually maximum capacity. Usually, processor performance in an SMP box starts to degrade after a certain threshold because of internal bottlenecks, IBMsays.

The company says it has avoided the bottlenecks by optimizing AIX Version 4.3.3 to more efficiently schedule tasks across the processors, as well as by increasing the bandwidth in the bus used to connect processors in the S80.

With the added horsepower, the S80 will be able to simultaneously handle a variety of compute-intensive applications, including Web serving, enterprise resource planning and decision support, IBM claims. This ability should help companies looking to consolidate servers. IBM has also added a workload manager feature to AIX that will prioritize select RS/6000 functions, such as Web serving, guaranteeing the Web application gets the requisite processing power.

To further boost Web server performance, IBM has made several other AIX tweaks, such as placing caching directly under the control of the AIX software kernel.

The S80's processors can also cache Web pages directly to the server's main memory, boosting the number of cachable pages. Moreover, the S80's memory has been increased to 64G bytes, double that of the S70 Advanced.

With these improvements, a 12-way S80 is said to be able to handle 40,161 Web hits per second, a threefold increase over the S70 Advanced, and a 66% increase over the former leader, the HP 9000 N-Class server, according to Standard Performance Evaluation Corp., a nonprofit testing firm.

While pricing has yet to be determined, IBM executives say the S80 will cost more than the S70 Advanced, which ranges between $150,000 and $300,000. The S80 will be competitive with the Sun Enterprise 10000, which can run into the millions of dollars, IBM says.

Just where the RS/6000 fits in vis-à-vis servers from newly acquired Sequent is not entirely clear. However, IBM has maintained that the Sequent NUMA-Q line sits just below the RS/ 6000 and just above the Netfinity PC server line. NUMA-Q runs a proprietary version of Unix, which IBM wants to use to get access to nonuniform memory access capabilities for the RS/6000 and other servers.

IDC's Bozman says IBM will use the S80 to offer users a choice: They no longer have to buy the parallel processing SP RS/6000 supercomputer to boost Unix performance. Users can go to the S80 and exploit its SMP technology, instead.

Beta testers from ACI Worldwide, a maker of financial transaction software in Omaha, Neb., claim the S80 has an impressive level of performance. ACI is an IBM partner and an RS/6000 user. ACIexecutives claim S80 has the necessary scalability and speed required by large banking institutions, and any bottlenecks found during testing were easily fixed.