RISC blades will ease out racks…eventually

Blade servers built around RISC processors can support mission-critical applications. ABHINAV SINGH says that RISC blades are going to be deployed in data centres, muscling onto the turf occupied by rack servers

ANIL VALLURI points out that Finacle, the core banking solution from Infosys, runs successfully on a RISC platform

x86-BASED machines dominate the market for server blades. That’s largely because historically, x86 blades were the first to market, and for a long time, the only blade products available. With 64-bit RISC processor-based blade servers entering the market, enterprises are piloting mission-critical applications on them. To start with, RISC blades will be limited to niche areas such as data centres of telcos and BFSI companies. As enterprises complete successful test runs of mission-critical applications on these servers, we expect RISC blades to enter the mainstream of business computing.

‘Do more with less’ is a directive that applies to data centre managers. A large enterprise that uses thousands of servers will face a space crunch in its data centre if it keeps on adding servers to run myriad applications.

Perceived superiority helps the leader

On at least one point, RISC blades are clearly superior to traditional x86 ones—in stark contrast to their 32-bit x86 counterparts, they’re 64-bit machines. Says Anil Sethi, country manager, eServer xSeries and IntelliStation, IBM India, “Companies want to shift to RISC blades due to their rugged nature and scalability.” He explains that although the Xeon-based HS20 can provide the same functionality as a JS20 (a RISC blade running Linux), customers have inhibitions about running mission-critical applications on an x86 platform. The fear of the operating system crashing while running a mission-critical application on a 32-bit platform is widespread. On the other hand, enterprises have been running their critical applications on 64-bit RISC platforms for decades, so 64-bit blades are more acceptable. Chip designing and seismology applications are memory hogs that need very high throughput. RISC blades can support such memory-hungry applications as well as business applications with similar computing resource requirements such as core banking. Notes Anil Valluri, director, Systems Engineering, Sun Microsystems India, “A classic case in point is Finacle, the core banking solution from Infosys that’s successfully running on a RISC platform (SPARC Solaris).”

Says Gopi Garge, chief executive officer, Exocore (a technology consulting company), “RISC blades provide superior throughput due to their basic architecture giving customers high operational efficiency and stable performance. RISC blades can do more in less time, taking less CPU cycles than x86 blade servers.” Managing RISC blades is also smoother than in the case of x86 blades. Garge explains that the I/O of RISC blades is tuned during the development process for high-speed processing. People using RISC blades claim that they will become cheaper and faster as volumes pick up, driving large-scale adoption of these servers.

The deployment of RISC blades will initially be confined to computing environments such as large data centres as a consequence of the cost factor. Mid-level computing environments such as educational institutions and Internet service providers as well as companies using visualisation, 3D modelling and simulation applications will continue to use x86 blade servers.

RISC blades save power

Sun’s upcoming Niagara processor for server blades will offer 15x the performance of its current server blade processor, the 650 MHz UltraSPARC IIi. The Niagara’s power consumption will be quite low at 30-70 W. In comparison, Opteron and Xeon processors slated for 2005 are likely to consume 100 W each or more. Niagara, Sun says, will consume 50-75 percent less power. This will let data centres cut costs, and pack systems more efficiently. Of course, there is a power consumption overhead when you take an entire blade system into account, and not just the processor. Comparing systems instead of processors doesn’t favour the upcoming RISC blades quite as much as a head-to-head face-off between processors.

Handling OLTP

Sun believes that Niagara, which is currently in the design phase, will revolutionise RISC blade server technology. Valluri says, “This processor will let RISC blades support mid-level Online Transaction Processing (OLTP) environments. We feel that it will change the blade server market in India [for good].” IBM, on the other hand, wants to wait and watch to see how RISC blades pan out in an OLTP environment. Observes Garge, “Vendors are attempting to make RISC blade servers work in an OLTP environment. What remains to be seen is how distributed the applications are and whether you are able to run parts of the application on different CPUs.”

Better resource allocation

ARUN NATARAJAN says that HP will see how the market for Itanium-based blade servers shapes up in India after its launch

RISC servers can be dynamically partitioned (memory /processor) so that a part of a processor can be used to run a database or enterprise application while the rest of the CPU’s resources are devoted to another application. In this scenario, both applications would use the same operating system instance. (The technology is not yet available on a RISC blade architecture.) Although IBM’s RISC blade server, the JS20, supports Linux, Big Blue is yet to bring out a version of JS20 that supports AIX. When that happens it will be possible to do dynamic logical partitioning on an IBM RISC blade. Says Garge, “It is possible to assign an application process onto a specific processor on the blade. It is also possible to assign an application to a set of blades. Broadly, RISC blades facilitate computing on demand.”

64-bit blade alternatives

HP plans to introduce the AMD Opteron 64-bit processor in blade servers by Q3 2004, and its 64-bit Itanium-based blade servers by early 2005. Says Arun Natarajan, product manager, blade servers, Asia Pacific, HP, “We will see how the market for Itanium-based blade servers shapes up in India after their launch.”

RISC and x86

IBM’s BladeCentre concept lets an organisation mix-and-match blade servers. According to Sethi, “Companies can have a mix of RISC and Intel blades on the BladeCentre platform.” IBM has successfully deployed its HS20 blade servers at a Mumbai-based petroleum company. The blades are being used to run mission-critical applications. A bank runs its disaster recovery solution on HS20 blades.

It remains to be seen how popular RISC blade servers become. While many organisations have realised the value of RISC servers, the large-scale adoption of RISC blades will take some time. For now they are being targeted at data centres and for running back-end applications. Industry sources feel that RISC blades will give tough competition to rack-mounted servers. RISC blade servers will provide more firepower for mail and messaging, line of business applications, media streaming and database applications. With their arrival, blades are slowly moving from the edge of the network (mail, Web, proxy, firewall) to the middle-tier (applications).

abhinav@expresscomputeronline.com