IBM grabs a power pack

IBM’s feature-rich Power 5 processor gives the company a lead of 8-10 months over its competitors. Big Blue believes this will help it improve its share in the Unix server market, says AKHTAR PASHA

IBM is unveiling its third generation of Unix servers (the eServer pSeries) that offers high utilisation and performance, increased flexibility and lower total cost of ownership (TCO). The announcement has already created ripples in rival camps, for its Power 5 is expected to erode the market share of Sun and HP.

The eServer Power 5 product line comes equipped with a Power 5 microprocessor, which is enhanced by the micro-partitioning technology of IBM’s Virtualisation Engine. The chip, with AIX 5.3, delivers better performance than its predecessor, the Power 4, with higher levels of integration, a larger cache, and support for simultaneous multithreading (SMT). Each processor can support up to ten virtual partitions, with resources allocated in increments of 1/100th of a processor. This feature provides the Power 5 with best-in-class RISC Unix partitioning.

According to Puneet Gupta, country manager, eServer pSeries, IBM India, Unix server utilisation is around 15 percent. Customers tend to buy capacities two-to-three times greater than what they require to meet growing application needs and manage peak loads. This approach involves greater costs. As a cost-effective alternative, IBM has developed its virtualisation engine’s micro-partitioning to salvage unused processing power in a grid-like manner so that customers get value for money. This, IBM says, will increase system utilisation to as much as 60-75 percent. CPU partitions look like a completely independent server to applications, but are fault-isolated and security-protected from each other. With the Power 5, customers will be able to sub-partition a single CPU to manage workloads better.

Says Gupta, “The Power 5 will encourage enterprises to rethink consolidation and pursue a server virtualisation strategy rather than server consolidation. The Power 5 makes it easier to replace multiple systems with a single centrally-managed machine because the management software can automatically re-allocate resources as workloads shift.

What’s cooking in the rival camps?

Sun has a clear answer to micro-partitioning: N1 Grid Containers, a feature due to arrive by late 2004 or early 2005 in Solaris 10. These containers make a single version of the operating system appear to have multiple independent instances, and the technology will work on x86 chipsets as well as SPARC iron from Sun and Fujitsu. But there’s a problem—it can run only one OS whereas the Power 5 can run AIX and two flavours of Linux (Red Hat and SuSE). As for HP, the company continues to rely on the Itanium 2.

But according to Anil Valluri, director, Systems Engineering, Sun Microsystems India, “IBM cannot maintain large ‘cache coherence’ in an OLTP environment. It has a large amount of cache because of the large number of transistors involved [the Power 5 has 276 million transistors]. This will result in a glut of traffic [bus transfer to the cache] that will restrict the number of processes.” This will make executing tasks more difficult, he says.

Secondly, Valluri goes on, IBM cannot do real (meaning physical) partitioning, but only logical partitioning. The problem with this approach is that the system will be using the same power supply, I/O and memory, and if one goes down it will affect the performance of the server. Sun, on the other hand, has both dynamic system domain and containers to do real partitioning.

Big Blue is unfazed

Gupta doesn’t seem worried about such criticism. “We have something called Chip Kill memory, similar to RAID, that allows users to recover from 8-bit memory failures or even entire chipset failures. We also provide additional power supplies for redundancy and virtual I/Os. The virtual I/O has the unique ability to use the same I/O for multiple partitions which will be viewed as a dedicated card. Virtual I/O and Virtual LAN allow the micro-partitions to utilise other physical server systems effectively and in a redundant manner. They also allow the sharing of expensive disk drives, communications adapters and fibre channel-attached disks, and help bring down complexity and cost. The shared processor pool allows for automatic non-disruptive balancing of processing power between partitions assigned to the shared pool, resulting in increased throughput and utilisation.”

PUNEET GUPTA says that IBM is seeing a market for Power 5 mainly from large manufacturing units with ERP environments, banking and financial institutions, and telcos and research firms in high-performance computing environments

Gupta claims that initial benchmark tests show IBM’s Power 5 technology delivering more than twice the performance of HP’s Itanium-based servers, and three times the performance of HP’s PA-RISC and Sun’s SPARC systems. IBM says the benchmarks offer a relative view of the performance customers can expect for a particular application.

Not surprisingly, Valluri disagrees. “IBM has put considerable engineering efforts into benchmarking for many years. They have been chasing benchmarks to get their numbers right, but benchmarks alone do not translate into customer requirements. The Power 5 is designed in such a way that its large number of transistors will need correspondingly large amounts of cache—and cache is not relevant in an OLTP environment which is random and not sequential. Had OLTP been sequential, IBM would have benefited.”

Up and fighting

Indeed, IBM’s competitors are not taking things lying down. Sun is following a two-pronged chip strategy. The first is a partnership with Fujitsu, which will bring a dose of mainframe expertise to its SPARC 64 Vi processor. The second involves two ‘chip multithreading’ designs that can run several instruction sequences simultaneously. The Niagra is scheduled for 2006, and Rock is expected to debut in either late 2006 or early 2007.

HP, which continues to play the Itanium tune, sees several problems with IBM’s strategy. The thorniest issue, it feels, is the fact that the Power 5 does not run Windows. Hemant Kumar Tiwari, director, sales and marketing, Business Critical Systems, HP India, points out that Power 5 is proprietary in nature, and that its multi-OS

support makes consolidation complicated. By contrast, customers buying Itanium servers can get them from more than one vendor: HP, NEC, Fujitsu and Hitachi. Tiwari adds that the HP Integrity runs HP-UX, Linux, Windows and openVMS natively and concurrently in the same system. All operating systems can run as a single image or in partitions. With enhancements to existing Itanium2 processors expected shortly, customers can look forward to performance improvements, and, what’s more important, there’s no need to upgrade operating systems.

Will Power 5 kill Power 4?

Gupta says, “The Power 5 product line is expected to start shipping in India by the end of this month (August 2004), and we will continue to sell both Power 4 and Power 5 machines. There is no question of overlap as the two cater to different market requirements.” IBM says the Power 4 is meant for discrete workload environments, while the Power 5 is targeted at large enterprises that are looking for a fair amount of consolidation. “We’re seeing a market for Power 5 mainly from large manufacturing outfits with ERP environments, banking and financial institutions, telcos (running billing and customer support services) and research firms in high-performance computing environments.”

One thing is clear at this point of time—the Power 5 is expected to be a hit in the market since large enterprises are looking at managing large workloads in a cost-effective way. The fact that it doesn’t run Windows doesn’t seem to faze IBM because enterprises have always used Unix to run mission-critical applications. With its multi-threaded chip out first, IBM is gunning for leadership.

akhtar@expresscomputeronline.com