Sun Wants to Be the Star of the Data Center with StarCat
By Timothy Prickett Morgan
DATE: 09/25/2001
Sun Microsystems Inc will today make what will probably be one of the most
important product announcements it has ever made as it rolls out its high-end
"StarCat" Sun Fire 15000 servers at a gala in New York. Sun has kept a pretty
tight lid on the StarCat announcement, and as it turns out, the machines do
differ from what all the conjecture, speculation and rumors have suggested they
would be.
While there has been talk since the late 1990s about what the machines that
eventually became the StarCats would look like, and what processor, memory and
coupling technologies they would use, Sun is not going to want to talk about
those technologies all that much. While admitting that it has borrowed
technologies and techniques from NUMA, COMA and other processor clustering
technologies, Clark Masters, vice president of Enterprise Systems Products at
Sun, is calmly adamant that the StarCats are what he calls "SMP+" servers.
Sun obviously wants to give the impression that these machines, at least as far
as applications are concerned, are plain old SMP servers, like those that have
been sold for over two decades in the server business. "We don't think of the
StarCat as a NUMA or COMA server," he said. "This server has SMP latencies, and
it is just a bigger, badder Starfire."
The StarCat is implemented using a souped-up variant of the Fireplane crossbar
interconnect that made its debut in the Starfire Enterprise 10000 servers,
designed by supercomputer maker Cray and first delivered in 1996 and enhanced
over the years by Sun as it purchased the carcasses of a number of parallel
supercomputer makers, namely Thinking Machines and Kendall Square.
Technically speaking, this improved Fireplane interconnect is an 18-by-18
triple-crossbar switch, which has links for data, addresses and response
control information to keep everything balanced across the crossbar. The
StarCat will support up to 576Gb of main memory, which is more than twice that
of any high-end server on the market today.
Contrary to conjecture, Masters says that the 72-way SMP implementation of the
StarCat server is not created from clustering eight-way Sun Fire 3800 or 24-way
Sun Fire 6800 servers using the forthcoming "WildCat" high-speed system
interconnect. The WildCat system interconnect will be used in the Sun Fire
server line to create clusters that are bigger than the 106-way upper limit of
scalability in the StarCat server.
The four-way processor boards used in the 72-way StarCat server plug into a
backplane, just like the same four-way cards used in the Sun Fire midrange
line. These StarCat system boards are equipped with processors and memory, just
like the Sun Fire midrange boards are. Separate I/O cards plug into the
backplane and are associated with particular dynamic domains in the server in
both the StarCat and Sun Fire midrange machines.
To go above 72-way SMP, customers have to unplug an I/O card, which they can
replace with a two-way server board that has no memory and is only used as a
processing engine to, for instance, act as a hot swap or for workload spikes or
other load balancing. Up to 17 of these two-way UltraSparc-III server boards
can be added to the StarCat server, which brings the total SMP scalability up
to 106 processors. Exactly how these memory-less, stateless processing engines
will be used by databases and applications is unclear.
The StarCat server uses the 900MHz version of the UltraSparc-III+ processor,
which is not yet available in the Sun Fire midrange or entry server lines.
However, Sun has promised that the 900MHz versions of the four-way system
boards used in the Sun Fire 3800, 4800 and 6800 will be compatible with the
StarCat server. Customers who have 750MHz system boards will not be able to
upgrade these boards directly to StarCat machines, however. Sun has added RAS
enhancements and other features to the newer 900MHz system boards, and these
are not in the older 750MHz boards.
An entry-level StarCat with 16 900MHz processors, 16Gb of main memory and no
disk capacity or other peripherals has a list price of $1.4m. The StarCats will
support Solaris 8 with Solaris update 7 or Solaris update 6 with system
software patches. Solaris 9, which is expected to soon go into beta testing,
will be supported on the StarCats and, internally, already is. The reason why
this is true is that all development within Sun is done first on Solaris 9
these days; after programs for that future operating system are completed for
specific servers, then the updated programs are back-cast to Solaris 8. In
effect, Solaris 9 was ready for the StarCats before Solaris 8 was.
Sun is holding back on its benchmark test results until the show, but Masters,
in an obvious good mood as Sun is launching StarCat, quipped that "with these
new products, Solaris is as slow as it will ever be" and that "it only gets
better from here, like fine wine."
Of course, that all depends on how quickly Sun can build, test, and deliver
StarCat systems to the thousands of Sun customers who are ready and eager to
buy these machines to support new workloads, to improve the performance of
existing workloads, and to consolidate their hundreds or thousands of servers
down to fewer machines. Masters says that Sun already has a dozen early
installs, and that the company is through its beta and field trials.
StarCats have even been deployed internally at Sun to support its own ERP
applications. The company has been ramping up production of boards and spare
parts for the StarCats through September, and is obviously taking orders
immediately. It will, however, take some time to get the Sun reseller channel
up to speed on the new machines and trained to install and support them.
Masters says that the StarCats will not be fully deployed until the end of 2001
on a global basis, which is exactly the same story we all expect to hear from
rival IBM Corp when it debuts its "Regatta" Power4- based servers in a week or
two.
As part of the announcements tomorrow, Sun will announce that it has acquired
the Unikix clone of IBM's CICS transaction monitor developed for Unix operating
systems and sold by Critical Path Inc. Sun will be buying the Unikix product
line, the staff associated with it, and the installed base from Critical Path.
Financial terms of the deal were not known as we went to press. Sun obviously
has plans to more tightly integrate its Solaris servers with IBM's mainframes.
Last year, Sun was being warm and friendly to mainframes. And now, it appears,
it wants to start taking some slice of their transactions in corporations
around the world. timpm@computerwire.com
cbronline.com |
