PB, Intel investors, here's an interesting article from the EMC thread about EMC looking to possibly change from a Power PC to an Intel architecture for the controller platform for their Symmetrix product. Symmetrix is EMC's flagship product, well, as they describe it: "the industry's highest performance, availability, and scalable capacity with unique information protection, sharing, and management capabilities for all mainframe and other major enterprise server environments." The biggest deal about it is that it's the first highly successful storage product to be able to connect as a storage box to all "popular" platforms, i.e., Unix, NT, mainframe, etc., and share data across them all. Everybody in storage is trying to copy this capability now.
Article mentions possibly using the NUMA architecture in the storage unit. NUMA is an extremely powerful Intel-based multiprocessor architecture (well, doesn't have to be Intel based, Sun uses NUMA also). This design, if EMC/Data General go ahead with it, should help push the envelope in Intel based MP developments. Looks like EMC intends to be processing a lot of storage requests in this baby!
Here's the article, thanks to Bob Gauthier who posted it on EMC:
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EMC Mulls Changing Symmetrix From Motorola to Intel Chips
Section: 01. Top Stories
By Rik Turner
Market-leading US storage vendor EMC Corp is studying the possibility of switching the chip on which
the intelligence for its Symmetrix RAID arrays runs from the PowerPC from Motorola Inc to a more
robust alternative, with an Intel processor a strong candidate.
EMC needs to move to a more powerful chip than the PowerPC to meet the challenge represented by
dot-com businesses. Now sources within the company say the recent acquisition of Data General Corp
puts it in a good position to take advantage of DG's expertise in Intel.
Prior to the takeover by EMC, Clariion was readying a line of RAID boxes on Intel, precisely to attack
the data center market in which its Cambridge, Massachusetts-based rival reigns supreme. That line,
which would have been launched in mid-2000, was code-named K10, and Clariion's experience of
porting its RAID intelligence from the PowerPC its existing products used to Intel's 32-bit chips could
now well feed into EMC's efforts in this area.
The move to Intel would also make it easier for EMC to take full advantage of DG's extensive know-how
in Non-Uniform Memory Architecture (NUMA), which runs on Intel chips in the acquired company's
Aviion servers.
Last week EMC Mike Ruettgers hinted that more announcements in the context of NUMA were on the way
shortly from the company, adding that they would be made jointly with Microsoft at Comdex, a further
indication that Intel looks to be the favorite for future generations of Symmetrix. |
