Compaq: Blades, 8-way Foster, EV7 and McKinley

“According to IDC, 2002 will be flat compared to 2001 across all segments,” says Pallab Talukdar, director-enterprise products, Compaq Computer India. Interestingly, Intel server revenues have already exceeded those of RISC boxes. Last year the split was 58:42 and this is expected to stay the same since experts anticipate both SIAS and RISC will remain flat this year.

“We expect to see growth in telecom, banking, finance and insurance and perhaps e-governance.

The hope is there that specific thrusts will be made and mandatory recommendations put in place as suggested by the industry,” he adds.

Compaq’s roadmap includes what Talukdar calls, “the usual product refreshes.” Q1 has already seen the launch of the company’s blade offering. In Q2 Compaq is going to launch a new 8-way server based around Intel’s upcoming Foster chip. H2 will see the successor to Itanium, McKinley being launched, and Compaq will have its own McKinley-based systems on the market at that point.

The company’s Alpha line will see the successor to the EV68 in the summer of 2002. EV7 systems will be released toward the end of the year. “The EV7 scales differently. It doubles the scaling and you can go up to 64 processors in a single box,” says Talukdar. A new operating system version will also be rolled out for Compaq’s top of the line Tandem servers.

Acer: Intel will put pressure on RISC

Acer set the cat among the pigeons when it launched a server priced at Rs 60,000 some time back. The company has always been a 100 percent Intel shop and this gives it a strong feel of how the Intel market is heading. Sam Oommen Thomas, senior product marketing manager, Acer India predicts that, “Intel will gain a stronger hold on the market. Itanium is still in the proof of concept stage till McKinley comes out. The traditional RISC market will see further pressure from Intel in 2002-03.”

Acer has seen demand for server clusters rising over the past year and it expects this phenomenon to gain momentum in the coming one. The company believes that organisations with a turnover greater than Rs 500 crore who are implementing ERP, SCM and CRM solutions will start using Intel boxes as part of such solutions to a greater extent in the coming fiscal.

“AMD will be releasing its Hammer CPU. This looks like an interesting architecture as it claims to be backward compatible,” says Thomas.

In terms of hardware, all Acer servers will ship with DDR SDRAM by Q2 2002. They will also shift to using PCIX for I/O, Ultra 320 for storage and gigabit Ethernet on the motherboard for networking. For external storage, the company will use fibre channel from 100 Mbps to 2 Gbps. Infiniband will make its debut in the second half of the year. The standard memory configuration on an Acer server will shift from the present 256-512 MB to 512 MB-1 GB in six months.

HP: Fostering hopes for Xeon and Linux

Raghu Raman, server marketing manager, Business Customer Sales Organisation (BCSO), Hewlett-Packard India, says, “There will be a thrust from Intel on the high-end Xeon front. One trend we expect to see is server consolidation at corporates with 1U and 2U rack servers moving into that segment in a big way. Companies are seeing the advantage of replacing their existing servers with a few rack servers offering the same or better performance with better scalability and availability.”

Foster will debut in May-June 2002 and HP expects to see a lot of action with the 1.8 GHz and 2.4 GHz Xeon processors. HP will simultaneously launch products using these chips.

Kamal Dutta, country business manager, Unix server & solutions, Hewlett-Packard India, says, “2002 is going to be the recovery period. We sincerely hope that market conditions will improve by H1 2002. We will have to wait and see what steps the government will take to improve the manufacturing sector and SME segment, which pushes the mid-range server markets in India.”

“We expect our market share to increase by 10 to 15 percent in the overall server market in India. With the new products we will bring into the market, this will put us in the number one slot. Going by our customer acquisitions in the recent past, the market is slowly recovering. We will support our customers through our consulting and services division. Our focus will be on applications,” adds Dutta.

Sun: Anyone for N1?

Sun’s push on the server front will be N1. The company that once proclaimed the network is the computer is now saying that the computer is the network. Formerly code-named Genesis, this will be Sun’s follow up to its Sun One framework. The idea? To have intelligent infrastructure that gathers resources and gives them to applications as needed, when needed.

“Smart Web services will take off in the next 1 to 2 years,” says Anil Valluri, director systems engineering, Sun Microsystems India. “We expect to see more large servers being sold. People buy more reliable, mid-band to high-end servers for mission-critical applications,” he adds.

In February 2002, Sun announced a plan to introduce a new family of servers with x86 compatibility, create its own Linux distro, port Sun One to x86 and port Sun’s recent storage products and software to Linux. This is, we feel, is a reaction to the fact that Sun’s traditional Solaris-Sparc model cannot beat Wintel on price-performance at the low end. Gartner comments: “Sun’s concession to introduce Linux as a native OS on Intel-compatible hardware means that the company has finally acknowledged that the one-server strategy (i.e., Sparc platform plus Solaris OS) will not suit all market needs.”

However, Sun will be marketing Linux-based servers only at the low-end, this being a strategic extension of its Cobalt line of rack servers. It is expected to launch server blades late in 2002, in which Solaris and Linux will be the OSs. The company’s Linux strategy should help it build a second phalanx of programmers from the Open Source community to join its existing army of Java troops to take aim at Microsoft’s .Net.

Gartner cautions, “Enterprises should not expect Sun to push Linux up to higher tiers beyond the network edge unless clearly compelled to do so. To differentiate itself, Sun appears ready to support its own Linux distribution under the Sun One umbrella as a common application development and deployment framework. However, Sun could decide to go it alone by making kernel changes that effectively fragment the efforts of the Linux community and tie users to Sun’s distribution.”

IBM: It’s x and p for Big Blue

M Ganesh, vice president, Enterprise Server Group, IBM India says, “Server consolidation will take place this year. India cannot brag about low cost labour any longer. People are choosy about head counts in IT departments.”

IBM has multiple offerings built around this strategy:

1. Linux on i and zSeries for large, workload consolidation

• The IBM eServer zSeries offering for Linux lets companies consolidate anywhere from twenty to hundreds of Sun and Intel servers. This is a first from IBM a Linux-only mainframe.
• The IBM eServer iSeries offering for Linux with IBM’s advanced ‘partitioning’ technology lets small and mid-size customers consolidate up to 15 previously standalone Linux and Windows servers onto a single physical server.

2. High-end xSeries for Windows/NT consolidation.

• New technology to reduce the cost of operating xSeries Intel-based servers, giving cost reductions of up to 35 percent and increased uptime over Dell systems, according to the results of an IBM server availability measurement tool based on Gartner methodology and research data.

3. p690 and clusters for Unix consolidation.

4. iSeries for Exchange and Windows consolidation, an effort backed by IBM Global Services.

Technology: Eliza, IBM’s autonomic computing initiative, will make use of a computer to manage itself. We are talking about self-managing, self-healing, self-protecting hardware. The system senses a pattern of problems and warns the administrator in advance. These capabilities will be seen in all of IBM’s server lines.

Big Blue’s mainframe experience is being put to good use to add clustering, workload management and security functions to its recent e-Server xSeries models and Regetta (pSeries). The company has released a roadmap for Eliza going up to 2003 and beyond that, wherein it will spend 25 percent of R&D money on Eliza.

While HP and Compaq will migrate to Itanium in the medium term, IBM is still hedging its bets. The company is doing some Itanium related work and is shipping products using Itanium (such as its Intellistation workstations). But the company’s primary thrust is on its Power processors. This leaves IBM and Sun as the last major RISC vendors. With Regetta products such as the p690, IBM is turning the heat on its rivals as they struggle with the transition to Itanium.

Regetta has been an interesting innovation from IBM. The product uses fewer CPUs, less memory and consumes less power than the equivalent Sun product. IBM has its mainframe experience to help it push Unix systems into the realm of big irons. Of course, it won’t ask customers to replace big irons with Unix boxes. But Sun will.

IBM’s major product and service introductions in servers in 2002 will include:

• New Intel-based servers in the eServer xSeries and Unix eServer pSeries that would provide increased reliability and efficiency, with lower total cost of ownership (TCO).
• A forthcoming launch will be that of the IBM eServer x360 and IBM eServer x440 servers marking the debut of IBM’s Enterprise X-Architecture chipset that is expected to transform the economics of the Intel market by offering mainframe-inspired technologies to help customers consolidate scores of Intel servers and reduce TCO.
• IBM eServer z800 a new entry-class, lower-priced mainframe, bringing the Parallel Sysplex clustering technology of its z900 parent to customers who couldn’t afford mainframes. The z800 line includes a Linux-only mainframe introduced last month.
• IBM will also introduce z/OS.e a specially priced offering of the zSeries 64-bit operating system, designed specifically for new e-business workloads on the z800, including Websphere, DB2, Java JDK and MQSeries.