Compaq and Maxtor Corp., among others, plan to make announcements soon.
Feb. 04, 2000 (VARBusiness - CMP via COMTEX) -- Forget The Zone diet
plan or Jenny Craig's new spokeswoman. The real slenderizing revolution
is taking place in the e-business data center. Today, Internet and
application service providers want their servers slim, stacked, cheap
and easy. The parallels with current events abound, as these demands
from the leaders of the Internet world have brought a bit player into a
starring role. Nowadays, the unglamorous rackmount server is in "the
zone" as the center of attention.
"Major vendors are focusing more attention on rackmount servers,"
says Ed Wagner, an analyst for Dataquest Inc., San Jose. In the past,
many vendors had only a few rackmount models in their lines and did not
promote them heavily. "That's changed dramatically," Wagner says.
"Right now, racks are the way to go for the service provider (SP)
market."
Compaq Computer Corp. is the latest vendor to remodel its lines with
SPs in mind, following the course laid last year by Sun Microsystems
Inc. with the Netra t1 and IBM Corp. with its RS/6000 B50. Unveiled
Jan. 31, the new ProLiant DL servers put heavy-metal computing power
and light-rock manageability into small, rackmountable boxes.
"The Internet data center is expanding the boundaries beyond the
functions that have traditionally been in the server," says Paul
Gottsegen, director of Compaq's North American Industry Standard Server
Division. "SPs have an overall need for radical simplification, so we
redesigned our server lines to simplify product choice and usage."
Coming this spring will be Hewlett-Packard Co.'s radically redesigned
entry-level server line for SPs. "We're taking a long, hard look at
what the Internet data center needs to be," says Les Wilson, HP
worldwide mission-critical solutions manager for enterprise and Web
infrastructure. "Those needs are obviously very different from
enterprise data centers of a few years ago."
In a way, the server vendors have created a monster. The availability
of high-performance, relatively low-cost servers enabled the whole
Internet market explosion. "Without reliable servers, the Internet
would still be in the hands of corporations and organizations with
mainframes," Wagner says.
Because server vendors enabled the mainstreaming of the Internet,
they now have to feed the monster with servers tailored to its needs.
"SPs need to be able to add new services fast while providing high
levels of network availability," says David Lawler, Sun Microsystems'
Netra t1 product line manager. "They need to keep costs under control
by making the most of existing facilities, equipment and staff." That
means servers designed for SPs must be small, reliable, easy to use,
and easy to expand and scale.
They Need Their Space
A top priority for Internet data centers is conserving space. "A lot
of ISPs are the typical garage-space start-ups," says Lou Boffa,
marketing manager, IBM peripheral products and ISP practices for
KeyLink Systems, a distributor in Cleveland. "Even heavily funded SPs
find that data center space is at a premium."
Servers can be as slender as 1.75 inches high. Introduced last June,
Sun's Netra t1 server is one unit (1.75 inches) high. Forty can be
stacked in a single 19-inch rack. With Compaq's new ProLiant DL380 3U
(5.25-inch) server, 14 servers can be stacked in a standard Compaq 42U
rack. As many as 20 IBM RS/6000 B50 3U servers, 60 discrete network
connections and more than 720 GB of internal storage can be placed in a
19-inch rack.
Usually, calling something "dense" is an insult. In rackmount
servers, however, being dense is "a good thing," as Martha Stewart
would say. Thus, the "D" in Compaq's new DL line stands for dense.
"Whereas performance was measured in TPCC benchmarks, now it's
measured in performance density," says HP's Wilson.
The raw performance of Compaq's rackmounted DL servers is identical
to sister products in the freestanding or tower form factor, says
Gottsegen. New performance enhancements added to the Compaq DL380 are a
733-MHz, Intel Pentium III processor, 133-MHz GTL bus, RCC 3.0 LE
chipset and high-performance 133-MHz SDRAM.
Radical simplification and economics also determine the SP's fondness
for single- or dual-processor servers. "SPs are buying a lot of
inexpensive two-bys, the sweet spot in the server market today, rather
than splurging on eight-bys," says Wagner.
"Having one single processor server for every discrete application
implifies management," says Gottsegen. Whereas vertical scalability has
been the focus in server functionality in the past, Internet data
centers want small form factor, low-priced servers that have horizontal
scalability, which allows SPs to increase throughput by running the
same service on several systems at the same time.
Of course, some applications-such as database processing or complex
mail serving-don't benefit from horizontal scaling. "These do well with
vertical scalability offered by symmetrical multiprocessing systems,
such as the Sun Enterprise 6500 server," says Lawler.
Radical simplification has driven home the "keep it simple, stupid"
maxim in designing servers that are easy to deploy, manage and expand.
In Internet data centers, manpower is as crunched as space is. "Service
providers want stuff built in: built-in Fast Ethernet connectors,
built-in remote manageability, built-in remote power on/power off,
automatic server restart, and on and on," says Lawler. "Reducing
operator intervention is a must."
Easy And Serviceable
Ease-of-management features are present in most SP servers today.
"This enables systems integrators for Web servers to get the same
interface they'd get from the monitor attached to the server itself,"
says Gottsegen.
Even making servers easy to put into racks is important. Sun's Netra
t1 chassis has cable hooks on the back so SPs don't have to tie down
servers by hooking ties on fan holes, for example.
Serviceability features on new rack-mount servers include
front-accessible, hot-pluggable SCSI disk drives that allow easy
service and maintenance without interrupting system operation.
"The biggest downtime cause is people," says Wagner. "The design of
the box has to make it easy to administer for people who are, frankly,
not as well-trained as IT managers once were."
Those same people have to be able to expand systems quickly.
"Easy-to-access expansion slots are a must," says KeyLink's Boffa.
Lower cost and simpler operating systems have helped Intel-based
servers "make great gains" over Unix-based ones, Wagner says. The Linux
flavor of Unix OS could save the day for Unix.
Rackmounted, single-purpose appliance servers are the next frontier.
Compaq and Maxtor Corp., among others, plan to make announcements soon.
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