‘x’ is the word in Intel server space

IBM’s x440 server is a striking example of how proprietary innovation is still a key to success, even in commodity markets. Prashant L Rao finds that Big Blue’s xSeries is doing extremely well in the Intel server space because of its unique technology that lets IBM scale where no other vendor can—at least not with Intel’s popular Xeon MP processor

With its x440 and x450 machines, IBM is bullish about making inroads into the back-end database server arena as well, says Jyothi satyanathan

Conventional wisdom has it that markets where products have become commodities seldom return to a state where proprietary innovations hold sway. Conventional wisdom is wrong! Witness the branded fuel being marketed by Indian petroleum giants. While petrol is a commodity, the same is not true of Speed or Power. In the IT industry, Intel has been a powerful force in turning PCs, and of late, Intel-architecture servers into commodities. Yet in the midst of this conversion of servers into commodities, IBM has managed to surge ahead in the Intel server space by means of proprietary innovations.

Big Blue’s x440 servers use technology from its mainframe and UNIX lines, and the revolutionary CEC (Central Electronics Complex) that makes the x440 tick is as proprietary as it gets. The x440 gives IBM a lock-hold on the high-end of the Intel server market, with no competition in sight for the near term. IBM is the only major server vendor to sell 16-way Intel servers (a 32-way box is due by end-2003) that make use of Intel’s Xeon MP processors. HP has given up on the Xeon beyond 8-way (it is concentrating on Itanium for 16- and 32-way boxes) and Dell tops out at 8-way.

The proof of the pudding
According to IDC India, IBM’s Intel server business grew 3.6 percent year-on-year in 2002, it increased its share of the Intel server pie by 7 percentage points, driven to a great extent by its top-of-the-line x440 boxes in a market where others saw marginal or negative growth. While HP is still numero uno in the standard Intel architecture server (SIAS) space, its market share has dropped from 49.8 percent in 2001 to 37.8 percent in 2002. IBM’s share went up from 23 percent to 29.8 percent in the same period. No other vendor has more than 10 percent.

IBM has been gaining while the overall SIAS market has been shrinking. Its flagship Intel box, the x440, that started off as an 8-way and went 16-way in December 2002, has fuelled Big Blue’s performance.

x440—spearheading the assault
Traditionally, the database and application tiers are the sole domain of UNIX boxes while the Web or front-end layer is largely Intel server territory. With the x440, IBM has managed to gain a foothold in the application layer where its scalability—IBM is the only major server vendor to ship a 16-way Xeon MP box—is seeing it win deals against UNIX boxes. With the x440, IBM has won deals where it went head to head with UNIX servers from competitors. One such deal was Karur Vysya Bank. Another win was the Andhra Pradesh online project being implemented by TCS, where the AP government’s e-commerce applications will run on the x440. Talking of scalability, the biggest x440 deal so far involves eight 8-way servers (64 CPUs in all).

The back-end database server arena, however, will take longer to win over. But IBM is bullish about making inroads there as well with its x440 and x450 machines (an Itanium-based server using the same Summit Architecture as the x440). “Trust is coming in, we are talking to a couple of customers [for database server deployments],” says Jyothi Satyanathan, country manager, xSeries & Intellistations at IBM India.

ICICI Bank is running Siebel on IBM xSeries servers. Big Blue recently closed a deal with Standard Chartered Bank to do its end-to-end server infrastructure in Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. SCB had earlier successfully deployed end-to-end Intel (x440) in Muscat. In India, SCB is still working on its server deployment architecture. “We hope to have the x440, at least on the application layer [in India],” says Satyanathan.

Christanto Suryadarma, Asia-Pacific enterprise account manager at Intel Technology Asia says, “IBM’s Summit architecture is an excellent example of a chipset that can take the Xeon MP deeper into the enterprise. It validates the Intel Xeon MP in the greater than 8-way space.”

In Asia, the Bank of the Philippine Islands (BPI) uses the x440 for running Siebel CRM. The bank plans to extend that to running business intelligence (BI) apps on the x440 for compiling and integrating data from various sources into meaningful customer profiles, letting it anticipate customer needs and requirements. New Zealand’s Weta Digital, the company that is doing the special effects for the Lord of the Rings trilogy, moved from a RISC-UNIX set-up to a render farm of 450 xSeries 1U rack servers and 220 IBM IntelliStation workstations. “The last 12 months have seen xSeries grow in popularity,” says Suryadarma.

POSCO in Korea is the second largest steel factory in the world. It ran Oracle on RISC UNIX for many years. “We benchmarked with the IBM team and proved that we could replace RISC UNIX with the x440. The deployment is in progress,” says Suryadarma.

A performance platform
The x440 is positioned as a performance platform running Windows 2003 and Linux. “It has considerable momentum in online transaction processing (OLTP),” says Satyanathan. Earlier, UNIX was the only option for server consolidation and enterprise computing.

Customers started taking an interest in the x440 in mid-2002. IBM India is closing those deals today. It offers a free three-day consolidation study where an IBM engineer goes down and designs an architecture to consolidate the customer’s server infrastructure down to a couple of islands. That said, IBM admits that not all server environments can be consolidated.

Popular applications on the x440 include ERP (SAP), core banking (i-flex), CRM (Siebel), software development, e-commerce and mail server consolidation. Pricing for the x440 starts from Rs 25 lakh, including storage, additional processors and peripherals.

The x440 is being used to extend existing deployments when a new application is rolled out and in fresh deployments from the ground up. 70 percent of x440 deployments take place on Windows, with the rest on Linux. Linux is picking up in the government and the public sector; for instance, the Life Insurance Corporation of India (LIC) uses Linux. While IBM supports all the popular server distributions of Linux, it usually gives Red Hat 8 to its customers who want to try out Linux.

Going forward
Work is afoot on getting the Windows 2003-x440 combination certified. Once IBM certifies an OS-server combination, that means the combo can be deployed reliably and that it has been tested with a wide variety of enterprise applications. With the Xeon MP being tuned for Windows 2003 and hyper-threading, the x440-Windows 2003 combo should be a winner. IBM is confident that applications are getting ported faster than it creates new hardware. It plans to leverage Windows 2003’s in-built hot-swap features in the x440. In an 8-way box, fault tolerance is there to the extent that if one 4-way CEC fails, the other takes over and you can swap the first with a fresh, working unit.

“IBM’s EXA (Enterprise X-Architecture) supports both Xeon and Itanium. In the case of the xSeries and Itanium we will do the same thing as we did in the case of the x440. We will see what special solutions can be built atop the x450,” says Suryadarma adding, “We just did a SAP-Intel-IBM show in Mumbai. More joint events and joint customer presentations are planned.” There’s even a seeding unit programme for the x440 and x450 where potential customers get to try out these servers.

All clear for now
IBM’s proprietary technology from its UNIX and mainframe lines has given it a lock, for the time being, on the high-end Intel server space. Competitors can either buy the technology from IBM or spend years creating their own. HP is concentrating on Itanium 2-based machines in the 8-way and above category. Dell tops out at 8-way. The only way IBM’s near-monopoly on the high-end of the Intel server market can be broken is if HP succeeds in a big way with its Itanium 2-based servers. For now, IBM has its flag on the top of Intel server computing’s equivalent of Mount Everest, until the competition makes a serious attempt to dislodge it from there.