SGI on the prowl in SME segment

Since the Indian market is not large enough for its high-end proprietary products, SGI now wants to experiment with an Itanium 2-Linux combo in the mid-market segment, says Rahul Neel Mani

The Altix 350 is specifically engineered to provide technical professionals with superior performance and scalability in a design that is easy to deploy, program and manage, says Prasad Medury

SGI, a big name in high performance computing (HPC), has decided not to spare any area of business where there is compelling need for high-end scalable performance server products. Now, the company is leaving no stone unturned to tap the small and medium enterprise (SME) segment. SGI’s newest baby is the Linux-based Altix line, the SGI Altix 350. With an Intel Itanium 2 processor and the Linux operating system, the server is designed to function as a departmental server for organisations in the scientific, technical, and design communities.

More on the Altix 350

The Altix 350 is an addition to the company’s other Altix offering, the Altix 3000, the clusterable offering released early last year. Like the Altix 3000, the Altix 350 uses an Intel Itanium 2 processor and the Linux operating system. The Altix 350 has the same basic architecture as the Altix 3000, but is designed for deployments in situations where an Altix 3000 deployment would be nothing but sheer overkill.

Says Dr Prasad Medury, managing director, SGI India, “This is an offering to address the departmental server market needing 4-16 processors. The Linux server market, like Unix, addresses three segments: entry-level, mid-range, and high-end.” With the Altix 350 SGI addresses the mid-range (where there was a gap in the market); with the Altix 3700/3300 the company addresses the high-end market. As a matter of fact, part of SGI’s focus in 2003-04 is on trying to prove that Linux is a high-end scalable system. It seems that SGI’s key selling point for Altix servers is their capability to scale up.

Medury states that the theme for the Altix 3000 family is ‘Scaling Linux to New Altitudes’. “At the time of launch in January 2003, we announced the Altix 3000 family with a capability to scale up within one node to 64 processors. We have already achieved 128 processors within one node. Other hardware vendors are struggling to achieve this scalability, which proves that Linux can be scaled up,” he says.

One factor that absolutely goes in favour of the Altix range is that they avoid the pitfalls that other vendors encounter because of its underlying NUMAflex architecture, which enables one processor to share up to 192 GB of memory. This architecture was originally developed by SGI for its Origin range, and was ported from Irix to Linux when the company unveiled the Altix range last year. The NUMAflex architecture is the third-generation shared-memory system that is the basis of SGI’s HPC servers and supercomputers. “It is specifically engineered to provide technical professionals with superior performance and scalability in a design that is easy to deploy, program and manage. It delivers outstanding capability and performance,” says Medury.

Another key feature of the Altix 350 is an expand-on-demand option whereby enterprises can expand I/O processor memory as required. On purchase, the box is filled with memory modules totalling 192 GB of memory. These modules are then turned on when needed, enabling the enterprise to scale I/O independent of processor or memory since additional memory does not require an increase in the amount of processing power. The Altix 350 is currently capable of scaling up to 16 processors.

Will it find a market?

SGI is also believed to be porting many features found in its Irix-based Origin server line to open source and industry standard-based servers that make up the Altix line. Will server features of a proprietary nature be found in the Altix 350? Yes, says Medury. SGI Propack will be a part of the standard software being shipped. XFS, XSCSI, scientific libraries, etc. will be shipped with the Altix 350 too. “SGI’s contributions to the open source community have had one prime objective in mind—to help reach the community reach an enterprise-ready status faster,” declares Medury.

This being just a Linux-based departmental-level server for scientific apps and other such functions, its scope is very limited. Medury contests this claim. He says Linux penetration has been very high in the server segment. Even in the desktop space more adoption is expected as more corporate entities adopt Linux in the next two to three years. Today, both in the technical and enterprise computing markets, we see datasets increasing rapidly with the need for servers and operating systems to address larger file sizes needing larger memory. “The Altix 350 offers 64-bit Linux, which, in conjunction with the NUMAflex system architecture, enables handling of large files and very large memory addressability,” says Medury. To this end, the company will initially be supporting both Red Hat and SUSE Linux distributions.

This newcomer will be offered to SGI customers through its Indian business partners like CMC, CMS Computers, Tata Elxsi, etc, but the company will also be selling directly to strategic organisations that it deals with directly.

Despite budgets being low and purchases not looking northward, SGI feels that with the Altix 3700/3300 it has made waves in the market. “Because of the price/performance of the Altix 350, and because it is a mid-range server, we expect even better results in terms of numbers for it,” says Medury.

In the US, SGI offers the Altix 350 at $12,199 (introductory price). A 4-processor configuration carries a list price of $21,599, or $5,400 per processor. Sources in the company claim there will be an advantage up to 50 percent in price and up to 75 percent in performance for the Altix 350 as compared to similar, although proprietary, Unix SMP servers from Sun, IBM and Hewlett-Packard. Also, the Altix line is strategically important for SGI, which has been struggling for years to recover from a failed bid to expand into the mainstream server market. Its core customer base typically uses computers with SGI’s own MIPS processors and the Irix version of the Unix operating system. Moving to Intel’s Itanium chips and to Linux will probably reduce SGI’s heavy expenditure on R&D for its proprietary systems, and enable it to search for new markets to sell its wares. Last but not the least, the Altix line will allow SGI to cater to growing sections of the market.

But other server giants and prominent HPC players are not sitting quietly, and have filled their stables with alternatives for customers.

The IBM eServer p650, launched some time ago, brings the blazing performance and autonomic computing capabilities of the groundbreaking IBM eServer p690 to the mid-range. The eServer p650 has already beaten previous records for eight-way Web serving and Java application performance, and beats any comparable server in this range. It offers native Linux support. Linux on IBM pSeries servers leverages many of the competitive advantages of eServer pSeries hardware while allowing organisations to utilise open, standards-based applications in a cost-effective Linux environment.

HP RX 5670 is another hurdle in the way of Altix 350. It offers one to four Intel Itanium 2 processors of 1.3 GHz or 1.5 GHz, 6.4 GB/s system bus bandwidth and up to 96 GB DDR memory, and 12.8 GB/sec bandwidth. This supports HP-UX 11i v2, Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition (64-bit), and Linux.

The Sun Fire V880z visualisation server is yet another affordable platform for deploying high-end visualisation technology. The system features single or dual Sun XVR-4000 graphics accelerators that plug directly into the Sun Fireplane interconnect of the Sun Fire V880 server. The Sun XVR-4000 provides exceptional visual quality critical for large display environments.

The bottom line for SGI is simple: Altix will have to be aggressively marketed to beat the competition.

The NUMAflex advantage

NUMAflex enables users to achieve technical breakthroughs faster by delivering scalable, low-latency memory access and efficient resource management with a choice of programming model and operating environment. This combination of capability and deployability makes NUMAflex an ideal architectural solution for high-productivity computing. System scalability with low-latency memory access: The architecture incorporates a low-latency, high-bandwidth interconnect that is designed to maintain performance as it scales, allowing efficient access to local and remote memory without the bottlenecks associated with switches, backplane, and other commodity interconnect technologies. Efficient resource management: The architecture is designed to run complex models frequently, and because the entire memory space is shared, large models fit into memory with no programming model restrictions. Rather than waiting for all processors to complete their assigned tasks, the system dynamically reassigns resources to more complex areas, resulting in faster time-to-solution. Ease of deployment: The architecture is easy to deploy. NUMAflex offers an unrivalled choice of operating environments, processors and components, spanning the gap between proprietary and standard solutions by supporting MIPS or Intel processors, PCI or XIOTM interconnect schemes, and both IRIX and Linux operating systems. This allows you to customise the system to your high-productivity computing needs, and easily scale the system over time as your performance requirements evolve.

rahul@expresscomputeronline.com