This is a very complete article from InfoWorld:
Monday, Oct. 2, 2000 11:05 am PT
Lawrence Weinbach: CEO of Unisys discusses the company's plans with Microsoft and scaling data centers
By Tom Sullivan
A MONTH AFTER taking the helm at Unisys, CEO Lawrence Weinbach called Microsoft President and CEO Steve Ballmer with a mutually beneficial notion of getting Unisys into the Windows NT market and helping Microsoft work its way higher into the enterprise.
To hear Weinbach tell it, he had to lower the volume on his phone because the ever-energetic Ballmer was boiling over with enthusiasm.
The deal was signed shortly thereafter, and three years later the two companies delivered on the early discussions: Microsoft brought its Windows 2000 Datacenter Server to market and Unisys has the 32-way server in place to run it on the beefiest hardware the OS can handle.
At the launch of Microsoft's Enterprise Servers, InfoWorld Senior Writer Tom Sullivan sat down with Weinbach to discuss the advantages of scaling up vs. scaling out, 32-way cellular multiprocessing, and how Datacenter and .NET are changing the roles of hardware vendors.
InfoWorld: Having a presence in the Windows server market is relatively new for Unisys. What drove you to become a player in the market?
Weinbach: We wanted to get into the NT arena. We really thought that NT was going to get price/performance difference from Unix because Unix got split up and nobody really controlled it. One of the reasons we wanted to get into the NT space is that if you look at the space the way we did at that time, there were lots and lots of players in Unix, and Linux was in the early stages and it certainly wasn't going to scale. It still doesn't scale to what we're talking about here. So moving into the Windows market was a great opportunity; not that this is our debut in the Windows space, but it is the culmination of three years of work by the Unisys people.
InfoWorld: The 32-way systems are gaining momentum at least among the vendors that will be offering them. But other vendors say that 8-way processing is the sweet spot in the market. How many 32-way servers do you expect to sell this year?
Weinbach: We think the 8-ways will become a commodity like the 2-ways and 4-ways. So we decided to move up to 32 because no one else is in the 32-way space. Anyone selling 32-ways on an Intel chip with Windows Datacenter is getting it from us. Now there are a lot of people speculating about what will happen when Intel comes out with the 64-processor McKinley, but that is several years away. We're working on it; others are working on it; but how that field will play out and who is going to have the best mousetrap and who is going to OEM from whom, that's not going to be played out for a few years. In the short term, we've got the only game in town right now.
The other thing is, Sun did a great job in the marketplace with proprietary Solaris systems, so we wanted to have something to give the marketplace an alternative.
InfoWorld: What kind of demand is there for 32-way Wintel systems?
Weinbach: Right now we think there is tremendous demand. We have almost 200 orders. We've shipped over 130 already, but what we're seeing happen is people buying ones and twos. But this is the formal launch of Datacenter. We've been sending it out with a beta and working with customers to make sure we provide the scalability they are looking for. So now they're looking to get the real stuff that is coming out, instead of just beta. So far almost 50 percent of the people who are coming to us have never done business with us before. Thirty-five percent are coming directly. If you think about it, look how many years Sun has been at it, and they just said they hit 3,000 UI 10,000s, and we just got started. For financial results, we're going to be conservative for 2001, because you don't know how this thing is going to ramp up. We have the capacity to produce 2000. But what the real demand is going to be? In 90 days we'll be a whole lot smarter.
These things sell for anywhere from $300,000 to up above $1 million depending on the bells and whistles, what kind of input/output you want, what kind of memory you want, and that stuff that goes around the processor.
InfoWorld: Price/performance is typically one of Windows' strongest selling points. But a number of analysts maintain that at the high end, companies don't make purchasing decisions based on price, and they are willing to pay for reliability and availability.
Weinbach: I agree, but if they can also get it for less money, they'll take it. And if you look at Unisys' reputation, the reputation of the commodity stuff isn't good, which is why we got out of that. But in mission-critical scenarios, with heavy transaction processing, high-performance scenarios, we've got a very good reputation up there. Our technology is good, our support system is good. So I don't disagree with the analysts, but our core competency is at the high end. I'm not saying we're unique, but we're offering an alternative, an open environment, so you're not with Sun. And if we are right on this, application developers will write more applications on this because Windows NT will be a single NT.
InfoWorld: What big advantage is there to scaling up, as opposed to scaling out?
Weinbach: The advantage in all this stuff to me is price/performance. I hate to be so blunt, but it's all about money. The best way I can explain it is, if I have a 32-way server where I can scale up, the alternative for scaling out is clustering; it will probably take me six 8-ways to eight 8-ways to equal one 32-way. If you go about scaling by clustering, it isn't linear. With each system added, you lose a certain percentage of capacity, so by the time you get up to six or eight servers, you are operating at 80 percent or 75 percent capacity on the eighth one. So when you start adding it up, you don't get eight 8-ways.
If you look at the proliferation that has taken place with distributed processing over the last 10 years, people have enormous numbers of servers. That puts some companies in the position of not even knowing how many servers they have because every day they are adding new servers. So we're offering the opportunity for server consolidation. Because we scale up, you don't need all those servers. So we look at this as: first, we can handle whatever you need to do up rather than out. Second, if you need to go out, you can cluster on our 32-way. We can cluster two 32-ways, and that's probably close to, say, 16 8-ways or so.
InfoWorld: One of the things with Datacenter, for the first time at Microsoft, is that services are really key to keeping it running to the level that Microsoft wants.
Weinbach: On the services side, there are multiple parts. There is nobody to OEM this thing that doesn't know it. We have all the technical services and support behind it. We also have application delivery people, so in some respects we'll compete with Andersen Consulting in application delivery. But at the same time, in technical service support we compete with Compaq. So as far as technical support, we as hardware vendors will have people available 24 hours a day. The interesting thing is that even as competitors most of us are partners because we need each other. We partner, we compete, we need each other in certain things. We don't need each other in other things. We all want the same business and we work together because we need each other. This is not about love.
InfoWorld: What role do you as a hardware vendor play in Microsoft's .NET strategy?
Weinbach: We will provide the hardware, the technical services to keep it up and running, and network capabilities; whatever you are going to do within your own network to keep your network up. We can take any application. We have systems integration capability to run with our own applications. And we can outsource anything you want outsourced, so we can go the whole way. We go all the way from building a piece of hardware to maintaining it, to the application, to the outsourcing.
InfoWorld: That is along the lines of what hardware vendors offered for NT 4.0. Does their role change with .NET?
Weinbach: Yes, the thing that changes dramatically is the higher up you go in the enterprise -- particularly with Datacenter -- the more technical support you need. The whole technical service capability changes dramatically because people want us to be there 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The other thing that is interesting too is the mind-set has to change. If you look at Microsoft, the people who are selling Windows for a PC are not the same people who are going to be in the enterprise. With NT, the idea was to sell it, have customers take it away, install it, and the person selling it goes on to the next sell. With Windows 2000, we develop long-term relationships. We've got to have the confidence of the customer. We've got to stay with the customer and they've got to be aware of that fact and believe that we will provide them with support throughout the whole chain. There is a huge difference between the two.
Tom Sullivan is a senior writer at InfoWorld. |
