December 15, 1997, Issue: 694
Section: Clients & Servers
Sequent Adds Fibre, Clustering To
Unix-Based Server
Chuck Moozakis
Sequent Computer Systems Inc. last week added clustering and
switched-fabric Fibre Channel capabilities to its Unix-based
NUMA-Q 2000 server to give data managers high-availability and
fault-tolerant features once only available in proprietary
mainframe deployments.
"These capabilities will remove some of the roadblocks data
administrators have been facing" as they move to more open
systems, said Steve Fry, manager of systems marketing for Sequent.
Sequent's NUMA (Non-Uniform Memory Access) server is designed to
leverage the new Intel 4x Pentium Pro processor SMP (symmetric
multiprocessing) baseboard as a building block for large systems.
Sequent's servers include multiple 4x Pentium Pro quad SMP systems
lashed together via an interconnect technology that can push data
among the processors at blazingly fast speeds.
Sequent is adding Fibre Channel support through the eight-port
Silkworm digital switch distributed by Brocade Communications
Systems. The device is one of the first to enable switched
fabrics, a Fibre Channel topology that theoretically allows
linking an unlimited number of devices. Sequent thus becomes the
first server company to support switched fabrics for open systems
deployment, Fry said.
"We can get eight paths through this switch, each sending data to
a dedicated storage system," he said. Each port pumps data through
at a 100-Mbps clip.
The switch lays the groundwork for "multi-pathing," Fry said, in
which disk subsystems share multiple switched connections to hosts
and storage devices. Such a deployment lets enterprises make their
I/Os parallel and provide additional fault tolerance.
It also lets companies store terabytes of data while avoiding an
I/O bottleneck.
Sequent's Clustered File Systems (CFS) software will let two NUMA
server nodes access files directly across Fibre Channel
interconnects, rather than relying on slower network connections.
CFS supports "active/active" fault tolerance and avoids some of
the clustering and synchronization issues that hamper Unix's
Network File Systems protocol, Fry said.
CFS, along with the multipathing capability, will ship by year's
end. Fry said Sequent is developing a similar Windows NT-oriented
product line for release in 1998.
Copyright (c) 1997 CMP Media Inc. |
