Servers: 64-bit to the fore

Price cuts, better technology and the need to consolidate servers will set the pace in 2005. Meanwhile, the commoditisation of entry-level x86 servers will continue, says Akhtar Pasha

The server market in 2004 was a mixed bag. The x86 market grew by 23 percent in unit terms. According to IDC, in this sub-segment of the overall server market, 62,956 units shipped in 2004 vis-à-vis 51,000 in 2003. In revenue terms, the x86 market grew by 16.5 percent in 2004. Says Aman Munglani, Assistant Manager, Computing Products & General Research, IDC India, "The x86 market was buoyed by the financial and insurance segment. Additionally, in banking, the prime driver was total branch automation that played a significant role in x86 server growth. Distribution [channels] also contributed to the increase in numbers." Within the segment, IDC saw customers moving from 1-way to 2-way servers. 1-CPU servers that accounted for 42.5 percent of x86 server shipments in 2003 dropped to 36 percent in 2004. On the other hand, 2-CPU server shipments rose to account for 61 percent of x86 server shipments, up from 54 percent in the previous year. Comments Hemant Tiwari, Director, Enterprise Storage & Servers, HP India Sales, "Spending by the DGS&D, banking (for total brand automation), telecom, SMBs and BPOs have boosted x86 server sales."

As per IDC, IBM leads the x86 server market (by units) with a 28.5 percent share, followed by HP with 25.5 percent and HCL with 14.6 percent. Says Anil Sethi, Country Manager, xSeries IntelliStation eServe, IBM India, "SMBs drove the segment. We saw major traction in the two-way x86 server market." Customised offerings were one tack taken by the company. It also extended advanced features from its high-end servers to the entry-level-simple swap drives, IBM Director-management software, and data protection with three-year onsite support at no extra cost. Offering better value for the same price has helped IBM garner marketshare among SMBs.

With regard to the Indian RISC server market, IDC says that it grew by 22.4 percent in 2004. RISC market revenues stood at $225 million in 2004. Adds Munglani, "Big spenders such as telecom (billing applications), BFSI (core banking and business applications), manufacturing (business applications) and education (for high performance computing) drove the RISC market in India." Sun leads the RISC server market with a share of 50.5 percent. HP and IBM are neck-to-neck with 24.9 percent and 23.8 percent respectively in 2004.

There were no dramatic developments in the blade server sub-segment. Says Munglani, "The blade server market grew by 100 percent with 1,055 units being sold in 2004 compared to 525 units in 2003. However, the high cost of blade servers is keeping customers away from this product category. Over time, when prices fall, we will see stronger growth." IBM leads the Linux server market with 51.98 percent share in Q304; Big Blue has thus doubled its share from Q104. The surprise element has been Sun Microsystems; it pushed HP into the third slot after improving its market share to 13.59 percent in Q304 from 2.28 in Q104. In the same period, HP's share dropped sharply from 30.3 percent to 10.52 percent.

The x86 server as a commodity

Desktops and printers have already become commodities. Now the same trend is moving upwards to touch x86 servers. 2004 saw 1-way x86 servers turn into standard, off-the-shelf products. That said, the real revenue in x86 servers came from 2-way machines. As 64-bit computing makes its presence felt in the x86 server space, customers of 1-way and entry-level 2-way servers are graduating to high-end 2-way boxes.

Server consolidation

Some large server consolidation deals took place in 2004. Aviva Insurance's entire 16-server infrastructure was consolidated on two IBM 8-way x445 servers using VMWare to create virtual servers. Bharat Petroleum also consolidated its server infrastructure onto xSeries machines. HP was not far behind. According to Tiwari, "x86 blade servers are helping customers consolidate their disparate servers running multiple applications. Blades help reduce the complexity of managing disparate servers, increase server resource utilisation, and are highly scalable. We have seen many customers going into server consolidation using the ProLiant BL20 and BL30 x86 blade platforms. Our x86 blade customers include National Securities Depository, Reliance, Idea Cellular and Ranbaxy."

The Opteron factor

Sun remains the strongest backer of Opteron in the x86 market, particularly since it recently scrapped its Intel-based server line. The company has sneaked into x86 market in a big way right under its rivals' noses. Sun's strategy for x86-64 is to market the AMD Opteron and Solaris x86 combination, and a look at the numbers reveals that the combo is a winner. As per market sources, Sun shipped 2,400 units of Sun Fire V20z and V40 AMD Opteron-based servers in 2004. Anil Valluri, Director of Systems Engineering, Sun India says, "The demand has been from companies involved in life sciences, grid computing, HPTC (high performance technical computing) and education, as well as from research institutes."

Opteron's success does not stop there. Sun scored a major victory early this year when it announced that the Indian Institute of Technology at Kanpur would deploy its grid computing hardware and software for its HPTC (high performance technical computing) requirements across its various departments. This installation will be the largest AMD Opteron HPTC cluster on Solaris 10 in the education segment in India. The IIT will deploy a grid of 200 processors. With this deal, Sun surpassed HP's 156-processor Linux Cluster deployment at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research running Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Integrity rx1620 servers.

Sun remains the most aggressive vendor pushing AMD’s 64-bit Opteron servers in the x86 market. But with support from HP and IBM, we expect our numbers to ramp up faster Sanjeev Keskar Country Manager AMD Far East & India	The Power5 can be used to replace multiple servers with a single centrally-managed machine as it supports as many as 10 virtual partitions, with each partition acting as a new server Jyothi Satyanathan Country Manager pSeries & OpenView IBM India	The demand for our AMD Opteron-based servers has come from life sciences, grid computing, HPTC and education Anil Valluri Director, Systems Engineering Sun (India)

2005 projections

The x86 server is projected to grow by 16.8 percent (in unit shipments) in 2005. The key drivers for the x86 server market will be government projects, both educational and e-governance. BFSI will continue to drive the x86 market. A couple of smaller banks are expected to surprise the market as they roll out total branch automation this year. On top of all this, BPO outfits will buy their regular quota.

Munglani offers this point of view, "Public sector banks and insurance companies with a large number of branch offices will continue to drive demand for x86 servers. Replacement and technology refresh cycles-apart from the automation of new branches-should help sustain healthy demand through the forecast period. Further, the growing use of IT within the government and the SMB segments will bolster the demand for volume servers for running network infrastructure and collaborative applications."

The AMD challenge

Sun is believed to have calculated that it can get big discounts from AMD if it can generate reasonable Opteron volumes. The company reasons that none of the other x86 server vendors will move away from the Intel Xeon processor because for pragmatic reasons HP, IBM and Dell will not duplicate their server lines. Although IBM and HP offer Opteron-based servers, Sun says that it is more serious about marketing Opteron boxes. But don't expect a price war between the Xeon and the Opteron, as experts believe that aggressive pricing of the Opteron by Sun will not result in a price war with Intel as it could hurt the latter's profitability. That said, if Sun is able to corner 25-30 percent of the market with Opteron-based servers, then Intel may be forced to match it on pricing. Sun is gearing up to unveil a fresh line of Opteron-based, high-end, mid-range and low-end servers this year as part of its Galaxy project. The Galaxy servers will include 8-way Opteron servers with AMD dual-core chips.

Sanjeev Keskar, Country Manager, AMD Far East & India, concurs with Sun's assertion. "By and large Sun remains the most aggressive vendor pushing our 64-bit Opteron servers in the x86 market. But with support from HP and IBM, we expect our numbers to ramp up faster. Our real competition has been with Itanium2."

Sun will come out with special bundles (driven by its partners) for its Sun Fire V20z and V40. It has allied with PortWise to bundle the latter's VPN/SSL solution with these machines. Similarly, it has tied up with Corazio for bundling business process management solutions. Its partnership with CVS IT (a SAP partner) will ensure that SAP

All-in-One is bundled with these servers. MCAD from PTC, Office in Box from Nitix, messaging solutions from Quantum Link and NetCore, AntiVirus from Trend Micro and a firewall appliance from Checkpoint are the other bundles. Sun's internal plan is to sell 5,000 AMD Opteron-based servers by end 2005 and to double that figure in 2006. KP Unnikrishnan, marketing director, Sun Microsystems India Pvt Ltd says, "Within the x86 server market we will ramp up our market share rapidly with AMD Opteron and Linux/x86-Solaris." Sun says that it will offer managed service capabilities for its blade server line-up in 2005, letting companies manage performance, operations and backup.

64-bit Xeon

Says Srikant Patil, Director, Solutions Group, Intel India, "The 64-bit Xeon/Nocona contributed 30 percent of total server shipments in 2004. As per IDC, 38,920 Xeon servers (1- to 4-way servers) were sold in India. Nocona gained traction in H2, and 6,570 processors shipped." He adds that all Xeon processors will move to dual-core and then to multi-core. PCI Express will become a standard feature to ensure better I/O, power optimisation and demand-based switching. However, Tiwari says, "There is still a lot of hype surrounding Xeon 64-bit. [If you look at market acceptance, Xeon 64-bit shipments] are not even 10 percent of total x86 shipments."

Nevertheless, the 64-bit Xeon is picking up momentum. IBM has designed a chipset that will speed up the performance of 4-way Xeon MP-based servers. "X3 will be used in an upcoming xSeries server, the first in a family of servers that are dual-core ready. The xSeries 366 is expected to be available in India during Q22005. The X3 architecture is 20 percent faster than existing 4-way Xeon platforms," says Sethi. Dubbed Hurricane, the X3 is the company's third generation of the chipset, the first two being Summit EXA and Summit-II (X2). Eventually, users may see X3 technology in IBM's BladeCenter servers. These will ship with support for dual-core Xeons well ahead of Intel's release of dual-core technology in 2006.

Codename Montecito

Patil of Intel says, "More than 1,500 Itanium2 systems shipped in 2004. The dual-core Itanium, codenamed Montecito, is next on Intel's roadmap and will be available in Q3 2005." The Montecito will contain 1.72 billion transistors, many dedicated to its 24 MB L3 cache. Along with the second core and other refinements, it is expected to yield almost a threefold increase in performance over the first Itanium2s running at the same 1.6 GHz clock frequency. The chip will consume 23 percent less power than the single core version, which needs 100W to 130W. This is critical in the data centre. Pundits believe that the Montecito could well fill the gap in x86 blade server market.

IBM's roadmap

Says Jyothi Satyanathan, Country Manager, pSeries & OpenPower, IBM India, "We have a clear roadmap for RISC servers for the next 15-20 years. In a typical enterprise environment, software licencing depends on the number of processors on a server. The Power5 can be used to replace multiple servers with a single centrally-managed machine as it supports as many as ten virtual partitions, with each partition acting as a new server. It also boosts server utilisation by 75 percent." IBM swung some big deals for Power5 with the Department of Company Affairs and a Central Government Initiative (Finance) for e-business applications. HDFC is another customer using these servers. Hutch has deployed pSeries machines to run its CRM application. UTI Bank is also using pSeries. Satyanathan adds, "The budget is behind us. Investments in telecom, core banking and industries are looking up, and the government has started spending on large projects. These factors will drive the RISC market in 2005."

More with less

Both x86 and RISC blades will find takers. Blade servers are based on the concept of 'do more with less,' and they are likely to find a home in corporate data centres. A large enterprise may use thousands of servers to run dozens of applications, putting data centre space at a premium. Here, RISC blades score over x86 blades.

RISC blades can bring substantial business value to large data centres where they are poised to replace rack-mounted servers. Currently, x86 blades dominate the blade server market, but 64-bit RISC blades are being piloted to run mission-critical applications. For starters, deployment will be restricted to niche areas such as large data centres in telcos or financial organisations.

The fear of an operating system crashing while running a mission-critical application on a 32-bit server is a common apprehension. 64-bit RISC architectures are tried and tested.

For applications such as chip designing and seismology studies that are memory hogs and need very high throughput, RISC blades work out very well indeed. RISC also scores in the case of business applications such as core banking solutions.

RISC blades give better throughput and can do more tasks in less time using fewer CPU cycles than x86 blade servers. Also, the manageability of RISC blade servers is relatively smoother than that of x86 blades. During the development of RISC blades, the I/O is tuned for high speed-processing.

Niagara rising

Sun is projecting that its upcoming processor named Niagara will have 15x the performance of its current UltraSparc IV processor. The eight-core Niagara will consume only 60W of power. Compared to the 100W or so consumed by the dual-core UltraSparc IV, each dual-core Opteron will consume no more than 95W watts under maximum operating conditions. Since this is slightly more than the 89W specified as the maximum power consumption for the current generation of single-core Opteron chips, it means that Niagara will consume less power than x86 servers, letting data centres pack systems more efficiently.

Better resource allocation

Servers running multiple applications can be consolidated onto RISC blades and dynamically partitioned into virtual machines, each of which is capable of running an application by itself.

IBM has recently announced a partner programme through which its blade server solutions built around x86 BladeCenter servers will be on display. Says Sethi says, "We will have Explore Centres that will display x86 BladeCenter solutions. These centres will be set up in Delhi and Mumbai.”

Entry-level BladeCenter servers will start with a basic price of Rs 2 lakh, with 1/2 blade servers, 140 GB HDD, and 8 or 16 GB memory. IBM believes that companies which would otherwise have purchased 2- and 4-way servers are going in for x86 blade servers. It will soon introduce RISC blade servers based on the Power5 processor in India.

Sun is girding up to launch 8-core Opteron servers. Says Valluri, "We are gearing up for the release of 8-CPU dual-core Opteron on Solaris 10.”

With grid containers that allow physical portioning of server resources, Linux binary compatibility, DTrace and Solaris ZFS high-performance file systems, Sun claims that performance gets a 30 to 100 percent boost.

Keskar of AMD adds, "The 8-way Opteron solution is available in India through our channel partners. If any customer is interested then we have System Integrator partners who will deliver complete 8-way solutions today."

HP's RISC blade servers are expected around Q4 2005, and will be based on Itanium2 processors. Its roadmap for PA-RISC will continue till 2007-08 and HP plans to release the PA-RISC 8900 in May-June 2005.

Beyond Moore’s Law

In accordance with Moore's Law, CPU clock frequency has doubled every two years. Meanwhile, memory speeds have only been doubling every six years, creating an ever-increasing gap. As a result, today's processors are idle as much as 75 percent of the time while they wait for data from memory.

Valluri suggests a way to address this problem. "Since network computing workloads are inherently multi-threaded, why not design processors accordingly? Instead of maximising speed, why not use the additional transistors afforded by Moore's Law to place multiple cores on a single piece of silicon, with each core processing multiple threads simultaneously? When a thread must wait for memory, the affected core will simply start processing another thread and hide the memory latency problem. This approach dramatically improves chip efficiency."

Sun is betting on the UltraSPARC IV+ which doubles the throughput of its existing systems. Says Valluri, "The UltraSPARC IV+ is expected to hit the market in the second half of 2005." The UltraSPARC IV+ will double the application throughput of existing UltraSPARC IV through expanded caches and buffers, a better branch prediction mechanism, augmented perfecting capabilities, and new computational abilities. In addition, the UltraSPARC IV+ incorporates a new 3-level cache hierarchy, with a fast on-chip 2MB level 2 cache and a large 32MB off-chip level 3 cache.

HP is slowly progressing with its mx2 dual-processor module. Veritas was the first customer to start using mx2 processors. Tata Tea, MindTree Consulting and Sutherland (a contact centre) are other customers that have recently signed up with HP to use Integrity servers based on the mx2 dual-core module.

akhtar@expresscomputeronline.com