On SQNT/Brocade. Two Silkworms per server. How many of these servers
might SQNT be selling?
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February 02, 1998, Issue: 700
Section: News & Analysis
Fibre Becomes Fashionable -- Burlington Coat Factory plan
optimizes I/O, server performance
Chuck Moozakis
For Burlington Coat Factory, a combination of high-powered servers and
Fibre Channel connectivity could be this year's Big Fashion Statement.
This month Burlington Coat (www.coat.com) is putting the finishing touches
on a multimillion-dollar yearlong project to migrate its data from older
generation Sequent Computer Systems Inc. SE-70 Symmetry servers to
Sequent's high-octane Unix-based NUMA-Q 2000 machines featuring
switched-fabric Fibre Channel connectivity.
The system, according to Mike Prince, Burlington Coat's CIO, will exploit
the capabilities of centralized control and avoid the choke points inherent in
most client/server deployments.
"It became clear that if we were going to take advantage of NUMA and
consolidate our servers, we would have to optimize our I/O," said Prince.
"The connectivity and throughput that switched fabric could provide us was
one of the factors that led us to buy the Sequent servers."
Sequent's NUMA (Non Uniform Memory Access) server connects multiple
Intel 4x Pentium Pro quad SMP systems via Fibre Channel, which pumps
data among the processors at a blazingly fast 100 megabytes per second.
Sequent supports switched fabric using 16-port Silkworm digital switches
supplied by Brocade Communications Systems (www.brocadecomm.com).
The topology distributes Fibre's speed evenly to what in theory could be an
unlimited number of devices attached to the host. In the NUMA design, the
switched-fabric link also enables the quad processors to communicate over
multiple paths, eliminating any processor bottleneck and assuring redundancy
and high availability.
With nearly 4 terabytes of data, Burlington's network is among Sequent's-as
well as the industry's-first large-scale deployments using switched fabric.
"We literally have hundreds of thousands of invoices per month," Prince said.
"We retain lots of history, and because we've been running Oracle since the
late '80s, we have lots of old data to manage."
Burlington's tracking and monitoring procedures provided additional pressure.
"A typical retailer might have 7,000 to 8,000 pieces of merchandise to track.
Burlington has millions of items in our inventory database," Prince said. "We
have 250 locations, and we track these items across four years of
merchandising history that we use for decision support. We had these
databases partitioned across nine servers. They will now be reduced to
three."
Steve Schuster, managing director at First Manhattan Co. and a Burlington
market watcher, said the company's new system should help it compete more
aggressively. "It appears as if they are taking the necessary steps to modify
their inventory strategy and improve the [speed at which inventory is sold],"
he said.
Burlington's three NUMA servers each boast three quads. Each server, in
turn, has two of the 16-port Silkworms, which manage data flow among the
quads, as well as to Burlington's Sequent RAID array that consists of more
than 600 9-gigabyte IBM disk drives. Veritas Software Corp.'s Sequent
Volume Manager is used to oversee the database and to "fine-tune" the disk
farm, Prince said.
"The power of the switches couldn't be maximized without the middleware,"
he said.
The migration of Burlington's data to the NUMA servers didn't come without
its bumps. For example, Prince said he had no way to port the Oracle
financial information to the NUMA machines. "We had woefully out-of-date
source and object code," Prince said. "The difficulty of moving that was more
than we anticipated." By mid-1997, software fixes eliminated the roadblocks,
and data began flowing without difficulty.
Meanwhile, system performance also improved, with some processes, such
as querying, accelerating up to five times faster than pre-NUMA days. "We
are seeing a 2x performance gain overall," Prince said. Migration times have
dramatically narrowed. The first NUMA took 36 hours to build using the
point-to-point Fibre Channel interconnectivity upon which the earlier
Sequents relied. The second, using the switched-fabric design, took fewer
than four hours, he said.
Prince believes the key to Burlington's success lies in the technology. "The
NUMA represents a breakthrough in the processing side, and that is
complemented by the Fibre."
Copyright (c) 1998 CMP Media Inc. |
