Unisys ES7000/500 Modular Intel-Based Servers

Transcription

1 Ian Brown Product Report 28 October 2003 Unisys ES7000/500 Modular Intel-Based Servers Summary Unisys was the pioneer of Windows consolidation servers. But for some, a $500,000 Intel server was a leap too far. The ES7000/500 Series offers a more modular, pay-as-you-grow approach to consolidation. Table of Contents Overview Analysis Pricing Competitors Strengths Limitations Insight List Of Tables Table 1: Overview: Unisys ES7000/500 Series Cellular Models Table 2: High-Availability Features: Unisys ES7000/500 Series Cellular Models Table 3: Clustering Software Table 4: Price List: Unisys ES7000 Aries 500 Series Table 5: Competitive Comparison: Unisys ES7000 Aries/Orion 500 Cell-Based Servers List Of Figures Figure 1: Unisys ES7000/500 Series Cell (Aries 510) Gartner Reproduction of this publication in any form without prior written permission is forbidden. The information contained herein has been obtained from sources believed to be reliable. Gartner disclaims all warranties as to the accuracy, completeness or adequacy of such information. Gartner shall have no liability for errors, omissions or inadequacies in the information contained herein or for interpretations thereof. The reader assumes sole responsibility for the selection of these materials to achieve its intended results. The opinions expressed herein are subject to change without notice.

2 Corporate Headquarters Unisys Corp. P.O. Box 500 Blue Bell, PA , U.S.A. Tel: Fax: Internet: Overview The Unisys ES7000/500 Series follows on from the vendor s ES7000/100 and 200 Series Aries and Orion models. The 500 Series uses the same Cellular Multiprocessing (CMP) architecture as the Series 100 and 200 models, but whereas the earlier products were large frame-based servers, the 500 Series is constructed from rack-mount building blocks or cells. The design provides a bolt together upgrade path and a range of configurations from a four-way to a 32-way Intel-powered server. There are six ES7000/500 Series models in total, although two of them are not actually built from cells. We ll concentrate on the modular cell-based servers here. A cell is a self-contained building block consisting of a rack-mount chassis, processor cards, memory, system interconnect, service card and input/output (I/O) slots (see figure). All of the cell-based models use 32-bit Intel Xeon processors. They are: ES7000 Aries 510 the entry-level model consisting of a 4U-high cell (1U or unit = 1.75 inches). It supports configurations of four, six or eight Intel Xeon processors with Level 4 cache accelerators, up to 16GB of main memory and eight Peripheral Component Interface (PCI) slots. A second such building block or cell can be added to create the ES7000 Aries 520. ES7000 Aries 520 the Model 520 consists of one or two cells mounted one on top of the other. The dual-cell configurations are connected via a side-plane connector. The two cells are synchronized via a common system clock. The side-plane connector links together the system interconnect and memory in both cells, retaining the centralized memory layout of the CMP architecture. The ES7000/520 supports configurations of eight, 12 or 16 CPUs, with up to 32GB of main memory and up to 16 PCI slots. ES7000 Orion 530 a two-node high-availability cluster in a box consisting of two model 520 configurations in the same rack. It is designed for use with Microsoft s Cluster Services failover software part of the Windows Server Enterprise and Datacenter Edition operating systems. ES7000 Orion 540 consists of two to four cells, again bolted together via the side-plane connectors so that a centralized memory core is retained to provide all CPUs with a linear view of the entire memory space. However, instead of being mounted horizontally, which would result in the server having a large footprint, the four cells are arranged vertically and mounted in a standard 36Uhigh, 19-inch wide rack. The 540 supports configurations of 16, 24 or 32 Intel Xeon processors; up to 64GB of main memory; and up to 32 PCI slots. Figure 1: Unisys ES7000/500 Series Cell (Aries 510) 28 October

3 Source: Unisys Corp. As before, ES7000 servers capable of supporting up to eight or 16 processors are called Aries ; ES7000 servers capable of supporting more than 16 processors are called Orion. The two remaining Series 500 models not mentioned above are the frame-based ES7000 Orion 550 and Orion 560. The Orion 560 supports up to 32 Intel Itanium 2 processors together in the same frame as up to 32 Xeon MP processors. There are a number of key differences between the cell-based models and the ES7000 Orion 550 and 560. Firstly, the cell-based models offer a pay as you grow upgrade path. Customers can start with a four-way cell and build up. They don t have to invest upfront in the full infrastructure of the frame-based models. Secondly, the cell-based models are designed to fit into industry-standard 19-inch Unisys and Dell racks and are more compact than the stand-alone frame-based models. Thirdly, the cell-based models support fewer hard partitions than their frame-based counterparts. The ES7000/540, for example, supports up to 32 processors like the ES7000/550, but only supports up to four partitions, compared with up to eight partitions for the ES7000/550. Like other Unisys ES7000 servers, including the Itanium 2-powered Series 400, the 500 Series is supported in Unisys s Server Sentinel and Application Sentinel software. Server Sentinel provides fault monitoring, recovery utilities and system-level management tools accessed from a PC. The Application Sentinel software suite includes workload management, application inventory and tools for optimizing Microsoft s SQL Server. Trial 120-day licenses for Application Sentinel for Resource Management and Application Sentinel for SQL Server are included with all 500 Series models, apart from the 510. Full license keys for Application Sentinel for Resource Management are included with the ES7000/530, /540, /550 and /560. More details on Server and Application Sentinel are included in the Server Sentinel sidebar. The ES7000 Aries 510 has an entry-level version of Server Sentinel called Server Sentinel LE and does not include the remote console manager card of the larger models. The Aries 510 does not support Application Sentinel. Table 1: Overview: Unisys ES7000/500 Series Cellular Models ES7000 Aries 510 ES7000 Aries 520 ES7000 Orion 530 ES7000 Orion 540 Product Type Midrange Intel server 4U rack-mount chassis Midrange Intel server Two-node midrange server cluster Enterprise-class Intel server Form Factor 8U rack-mount chassis Two 8U rack-mount chassis plus storage 22U rack-mount chassis 28 October

4 Table 1: Overview: Unisys ES7000/500 Series Cellular Models ES7000 Aries 510 ES7000 Aries 520 ES7000 Orion 530 ES7000 Orion 540 Date April 2003 April 2003 April 2003 April 2003 Announced/General Availability System Architecture Symmetric multiprocessing (SMP), four-way SMP, four-way nonblocking crossbar SMP, four-way nonblocking crossbar SMP, four-way nonblocking crossbar nonblocking crossbar Microprocessor Intel Xeon MP Intel Xeon MP Intel Xeon MP Intel Xeon MP Options: Speed/L3 Cache 2.0GHz/1MB, 2.8GHz/2MB 2.0GHz/1MB, 2.8GHz/2MB 2.0GHz/1MB, 2.8GHz/2MB 2.0GHz/1MB, 2.8GHz/2MB No.ofCPUs 4, 6 or 8 8, 12 or 16 8, 12 or 16 per 16, 24 or 32 Supported node System Memory 4GB-16GB 8GB-32GB 8GB-32GB per 16GB-64GB node Available I/O Slots 8 PCI + 2 reserved for partitioning 8-16 PCI + 4 reserved for 16 PCI per node 32 PCI + 8 reserved for partitioning partitioning Integrated/Bundled Controllers Ultra3 low-voltage differential (LVD) Small Computer Systems Interface Ultra3 LVD SCSI RAID controller, optional Ethernet or Gigabit Ethernet Ultra3 LVD SCSI RAID controller, optional Ethernet or Gigabit Ethernet Ultra3 LVD SCSI RAID controller, optional Ethernet or Gigabit Ethernet (SCSI) redundant array of independent disks (RAID) controller, optional Ethernet or Gigabit Ethernet Internal Storage Single drive Up to two system disks Up to two system disks per node Up to four system disks Hard Disk Options 36GB 36GB 36GB 36GB Maximum In- Chassis Disk Capacity 36GB 72GB 72GB per node 128GB 28 October

5 Table 1: Overview: Unisys ES7000/500 Series Cellular Models Operating System Support Maximum No. of System Partitions Capacity-on- Demand (COD) Option TPC-C (tpmc/$ per tpmc) Entry Price (U.S. only) Standard Warranty Support ES7000 Aries 510 ES7000 Aries 520 ES7000 Orion 530 ES7000 Orion 540 Windows 2000 Windows 2000 Windows 2000 Windows 2000 Advanced Server, Advanced Server, Datacenter Server, Advanced Server, Windows Server Windows 2000 Windows Server Windows Enterprise Datacenter Server, 2003 Datacenter Datacenter Server, Edition, SCO Windows Server Edition Windows Server UnixWare, United 2003 Enterprise 2003 Enterprise Linux from SuSE Edition, Windows Edition, Windows (support through Server 2003 Server 2003 SuSE) Datacenter Edition, Datacenter Edition, SCO UnixWare, SCO UnixWare, United Linux from United Linux from SuSE (support SuSE (support through SuSE) through SuSE) No hard partitions; Up to two hard Up to two hard Up to four hard up to 64 virtual partitions; up to 64 partitions per node; partitions; up to 64 partitions (1) virtual partitions per up to 64 virtual virtual partitions per system or hard partitions per hard system or hard partition (1) partition (1) partition (1) Not available Not available Not available Not available Information not 118,381/$5.56 (2) Information not 252,920/$7.22 (3) available available $38,000 $52,000 $215,000 $110,000 One-year, 9 5 nextbusiness-day One-year, 9 5 next- One-year, 9 5 next- One-year, 9 5 nextsitsite; onbusiness-day onbusiness-day onbusiness-day on- increases to site; increases to site; increases to 9 5 with four-hour 9 5 with four-hour 9 5 with four-hour call-to-repair with call-to-repair with call-to-repair with purchase of purchase of purchase of software support software support software support and Windows and Windows and Windows Datacenter Edition Datacenter Edition Datacenter Edition subscription subscription subscription (1) Virtual partitioning is via the third-party VMware GSX software, which must be purchased separately. It is supported on either Windows 2000 Advanced Server or Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition. Unisys recommends no more than four virtual partitions per processor and 32 virtual partitions per hard partition. (2) Server Configuration: Eight 2.0GHz/2MB processors, 64GB main memory, Microsoft Server 2003 Datacenter Edition, SQL Server 2000 Enterprise Edition. Availability date: 30 May (3) Server Configuration: GHz/2MB processors, 64GB main memory, Microsoft Server 2003 Datacenter Edition, SQL Server 2000 Enterprise Edition. Availability date: 22 July Table 2: High-Availability Features: Unisys ES7000/500 Series Cellular Models Hot-Plug CPU/Memory Boards No 28 October

6 Table 2: High-Availability Features: Unisys ES7000/500 Series Cellular Models Hot-Sparing of COD Processors No Memory Protection and Recovery Error checking and correcting (ECC) circuitry in memory Internal Hot-Pluggable Disks No Hot-Plug PCI I/O No Redundant N+1 Power Yes Hot-Pluggable Power Supplies Yes Redundant N+1 Cooling Yes Hot-Pluggable Cooling Yes RAID Controller Optional Mirrored System Disks Optional IP Multipath Routing Optional (OS dependent) Multipath I/O (disk) Optional Persistent Deallocation of Failed Components Yes Auto Reboot and OS Restart Yes System-Independent Service Processor Yes Redundant Service Processor Optional on Model 540 Table 3: Clustering Software Name/Release OS dependent; Windows Server operating systems include Microsoft Cluster Services No. of Failover Nodes Supported Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition and Datacenter Edition: up to 8 Windows 2000 Datacenter Server: up to 4 Windows 2000 Advanced Server: up to 2 Type(s) of Clustering Datacenter Server: failover; load balancing for up to 32 nodes Interconnects Supported Ethernet Failover Between Partitions Yes (1) Types of Nodes Supported Cluster-wide File System Consolidated Management Station Supports a mix of heterogeneous Windows nodes Disaster Recovery Support Windows: GeoSpan (integrates with EMC Symmetrix Remote Data Facility to allow servers to be connected in a cluster at up to 200 kilometers) (1) Requires an external Ethernet LAN connection between partitions and the implementation of Microsoft Cluster Services in both partitions. Analysis No Yes Unisys achieved reasonable sales success with the frame-based ES7000s originally announced in Typical purchasers were large organizations often established Unisys customers that wanted to consolidate multiple distributed Windows servers. With systems that scaled up to 32 processors, support for hard partitions and workload management software, the ES7000 was considered an ideal platform for server consolidation and large database environments. Many potential customers considered the initial capital costs of purchasing an ES7000 rather high, however. 28 October

7 The original frame-based ES7000, which lives on as the Orion 550 and 560, was built like a mainframe, hence its cost, but Unisys needed a way to offer a lower entry point. One that wouldn t frighten off potential customers. It also needed a means to enable customers to start small and grow to larger configurations, enabling them to stage their consolidation projects. IBM s modular x440 set the trend. It couldn t scale to a 32-way, but its modular design allowed customers to start with a modest two- or fourway configuration and grow to an eight- or 16-way. The x440 caught customers imaginations, and IBM found many more customers for the x440 than Unisys found for the ES7000 though, of course, the majority of those sales were four- and eight-way machines that would never scale up beyond four, let alone eight, processors. Unisys s answer to the need for a more modular, pay-as-you-grow platform is the cell-based 500 Series. The Models 510 through 540 are built around modular building blocks, as is IBM s x440/x445. Unlike IBM s four-way modules, however, each four- to eight-way Unisys cell is an entirely self-contained unit with its own I/O and chassis. Unisys has also designed an ingenious side-plane connector, which enables the ES7000 cells to retain the centralized memory architecture of the frame-based ES7000s virtually intact. On paper at least, the modular ES7000s should scale similarly to the monolithic frame-based ES7000s on typical online transaction processing (OLTP) applications. Target Markets Although Unisys has lowered the entry point for its ES7000 servers, it has not created an entry-level Intel server. Configurations of a single-cell Aries 510 start with four Xeon MP processors, expandable to eight. It s a midrange server, and it s aimed at the sort of uses that might previously have suggested a midrange Unix server midrange database server, middle-tier business logic server and, of course, consolidation server. The difference is that this is intended to bring the kind of stability, capacity and manageability to Windows that would previously have been expected of a Unix server. With a second cell, service processor and full Server Sentinel software in place, the ES7000 Aries 520 has the sort of capabilities and functionality typical of a midrange Unix server, such as the HP 9000 rp8400 or IBM p670. So the ES Series has two target markets in mind: Windows users who want to consolidate a mess of established distributed servers, and large organizations tempted by the superior price/performance of Wintel compared with Unix, but skeptical of its industrial strength. A Superior Windows Server? Unisys can be credited with producing the first Windows server capable of use for rational consolidation the idea of putting multiple workloads on a single server. With the possible exception of VMware s efforts at software-based consolidation for Intel servers, the ES7000 was the first server to break the one application per server model that has permeated Windows server environments. The first ES7000s and the latest ES7000s offer two options for rational consolidation: Isolating applications in electrically separate hard partitions, or running multiple applications on a single instance of the operating system and using workload management software (included as part of the Application Sentinel software suite) to manage contention for resources between applications. Hard partitions offer the best way to isolate applications that don t behave well together, which tends to be the case with some Windows applications Exchange and SQL Server are a case in point. Hard partitions may also offer the most efficient way to process large consolidated databases. There s evidence from benchmarks that partitioning the data and allocating equal-sized MP partitions to each data partition can result in small performance advantages (5-10 percent advantage) compared with a nonpartitioned database running in a single large SMP configuration. So, two eight-way partitions with equal-sized data partitions would perform marginally better than a single 16-way partition. 28 October

8 Hard partitions also offer a way to isolate applications with different characteristics, such as OLTP and business intelligence, or applications that run on different operating system releases or require different Service Packs and patches. But their most likely use is to separate test and development from production applications. Hard partitions have their drawbacks, however. They re not very granular, they re not very flexible (Windows still does not support dynamic partitioning), and users have separate operating systems and software stacks to manage. Using a lot of partitions becomes not unlike managing a lot of separate servers. Compared with nondynamic hard partitions, workload management software offers more flexibility. It makes dynamic use of processor resources, it s programmable and it works on a single operating system (OS) instance, so there s only one OS stack to manage. As already mentioned, Unisys provides workload management software as part of its Application Sentinel software suite. Microsoft also includes a finegrained resource manager in Windows Server 2003 Enterprise and Datacenter Editions (Windows System Resource Manager or WSRM). So which should you use? WSRM provides a good solution for customers with the technical skills and inclination to delve into the complexities of resource management and there s no charge for using it. Unisys does charge for Application Sentinel for Resource Manager, but its scope of resource control is broader than that of WSRM, and it s easier to use. Application Sentinel, for example, can dynamically allocate resources within and across ES7000 partitions, within and across cluster nodes, and within application components themselves. It was designed for the CMP architecture and integrates well with the Server Sentinel management software. For the future, Unisys is working with Microsoft to leverage the WSRM technology. One of the drawbacks of using a workload manager in Windows environments, however, is that most Windows applications are designed to work on their own dedicated server. Some of the features designed to make application development easier in the Windows environment, such as shared Dynamic Link Libraries (DLLs), can be a source of contention when the applications are run on the same instance of the OS, for example. Windows applications are rarely tested to see how they work in mixed workload environments. Unisys has therefore developed tools, which it offers as part of a service to customers undertaking Windows consolidation projects, which will test and identify which of the customers applications can operate together in a mixed workload environment. These tools are also included in the Application Sentinel software suite (Application Sentinel for Consolidation). In short, Unisys and the ES7000 have most of the bases covered for what s required of a Windows consolidation server. The full Server Sentinel software is supplied with all but the entry-level /510 models, and license keys for Application Sentinel for Resource Management are included with the /530 and above and can be purchased for the /520. Again, Unisys is rather like a Unix vendor supplying its own partitioning, workload management technology and system-level management tools, but in this case providing it on top of Windows filling in the gaps that Microsoft hasn t gotten around to. There are better mainframe and Unix workload and resource managers, but as far as rational consolidation on Windows goes, the ES7000 sets the standard. High-Availability Features High availability and system monitoring are also areas where Unisys has tried to raise the level of functionality above the typical Intel/Windows server to that more typical of a midrange or enterprise-class Unix server. So, for example, all ES7000/500 models support persistent deallocation of failed components if a processor in a partition fails and the partition crashes, the system will mark the failed component and automatically restart the partition minus the failed component. It speeds recovery and avoids the possibility of the failure recurring. The system can keep going, albeit with reduced processing power, until it s convenient to replace the faulty part. 28 October

9 All the ES7000 models similarly have a service processor, which can provide remote, lights-out monitoring, remote management of the system and call home capabilities. ( Call home means the server will automatically call a Unisys service center to report a fault in the server hardware.) Some other midrange Intel servers have add-in remote system management boards capable of providing similar offline management capabilities, but few are designed to do such comprehensive monitoring of the whole system, provide a call-home capability or offer the option of redundant service processors. Not Fashionable? So the ES7000/500 Series offers a range of midrange and enterprise-class servers that bring Unix-like technology and capabilities to Windows. Big, powerful servers that can be used to consolidate distributed applications or to run large scale-up databases for Windows environments. But they come at a time when the market trend is toward smaller servers. Windows users are discovering that they can replace old fourand eight-way servers with one- and two-ways. They can reduce the number of Exchange servers they re using simply by installing the latest Intel Xeon dual-processor servers. A dual-processor server with 3.06GHz Xeon DP processors can support 2,000-3,000 Exchange users in real production environments, and two such servers will probably cost less than a four-way Xeon MP server. It s a type of consolidation. Numerous examples now also exist where clients have taken applications that were originally running on eight-way or larger Unix servers and ported them to Linux on a two-way Xeon DP server that s a tenth the price of the Unix server and without the crippling support costs. So why would clients want to go back to the old way of doing things? Firstly, it s important to recognize that Unix vendors vastly oversold capacity in the past. They convinced you that you needed a big fat server for each of your applications, even though you probably could have run several such applications on the server. Unix is often just as guilty of the one-application-per-server paradigm as Windows. Vendors often didn t match application characteristics to the server, promoting big is best for all application loads better to have spare capacity than to run out. And, in some cases, RISC processing power simply hasn t kept up with Intel. Don t get us wrong, there are situations where a big box is required large OLTP applications require high I/O and memory bandwidth, for example. But on number-crunching and integer throughput, on applications that can be split into numerous parallel jobs and small stateless Web applications, such as serving http Web pages, Intel price/performance and scaleout increasingly have the upper hand. So is the ES7000 itself simply out of time? A solution to a problem that no longer exists? Far from it. In Windows environments there are still customers who need a large scalable back-end database server. Arrays of small scale-out servers may be less expensive to acquire, but securing them, backing up partitioned data and providing a mirrored site for disaster recovery will be more complex. And on complex OLTP with very high transaction levels, things like cluster interconnects compared with internal system interconnects will impact performance adversely. Secondly, consolidation of multiple diverse distributed Windows servers and workloads is still an issue in many organizations. Organizations need to get a grip on Windows server sprawl and, with care, the rational consolidation that can be achieved with partitioning, and workload management on a midrange to large-scale server such as the ES7000 can be beneficial. How? By using workload management software, administrators can ensure and maintain high levels of resource usage on a single footprint and software stack. The single large server is easier to back up (although this is often not an issue where server consolidation is accompanied by implementation of a storage area network), easier to secure and easier to manage. Clients often believe that server blades offer a similar kind consolidation capability. After all, they provide the ability to consolidate many workloads in one footprint. If they are diverse workloads, however, rather 28 October

10 than a single, cloned workload as in a Web server farm or scale-out number-crunching application, they still present management problems, such as managing diverse configurations, provisioning operating systems and releases, and maintaining different patch and Service Pack levels. And if it s one application per blade, there s still going to be a lot of unused CPU and storage capacity. In short, it s a matter of matching the platforms to the workload. Loading multiple identical Web servers onto an ES7000 using hard and soft partitioning will not make good use of the platform. You probably don t need even a midrange ES7000 Aries 510 for your Exchange servers distributed two- and fourway Xeon-based servers have plenty of power, can be clustered for failover and, because of the distributed nature of Exchange, can offer redundancy. But if you need a medium-to-large Windows database server, then the ES7000, even in its modular pay-as-you-grow guise, offers an industrialstrength solution. And if you want to consolidate multiple diverse Windows applications onto a single platform, then Unisys has a proven solution. Now, at last, with the modular ES7000/500 Series, it offers a more affordable way in. Pricing Table 4: Price List: Unisys ES7000 Aries 500 Series Model Description Price Aries 510 Entry-Level Configuration (four-way) Large Configuration One rack-mount cell (chassis) with four Intel Xeon MP 2.0GHz/1MB processors, 16MB Level 3 cache, 4GB main memory, eight PCI slots, 36GB disk drive, Windows 2003 Enterprise Edition OS license with three-year support and 5 9 three-year on-site/four-hour response hardware warranty As above, but with eight Intel Xeon MP 2.8GHz/2MB processors, 32MB Level 3 cache and 16GB main memory $50,000 $96, October

11 Table 4: Price List: Unisys ES7000 Aries 500 Series Model Description Price Aries 510 Aries 520 Entry-Level Configuration (eight-way) Medium Configuration Large Configuration Orion 530 One rack-mount cell with eight Intel Xeon MP 2.0GHz/1MB processors in total, 64MB Level 3 cache, 4GB main memory, eight PCIslots,two36GBdisk drives, service processor, Windows 2003 Enterprise Edition OS license with three-year support and 5 9 three-year on-site/four-hour response hardware warranty As above, but with two rack-mountcells,12intel Xeon MP 2.0GHz/2MB processors, 48MB Level 3 cache and 16GB main memory As above, but with 16 Intel Xeon MP 2.8GHz/2MB processors, 32GB of memory and 16 PCI slots $67,000 $186,000 $220, way Cluster Failover cluster consisting of four rack-mount cells, each with eight Intel Xeon MP 2.8GHz/2MB processors, 32GB main memory, 16 PCI slots, four 36GB disk drives, service processor, Windows 2003 Datacenter Edition OS license with three-year support/subscription services and 5 9 threeyear on-site/four-hour response hardware warranty $550, October

12 Table 4: Price List: Unisys ES7000 Aries 500 Series Model Description Price Aries 510 Orion 540 Entry-Level Configuration (16-way) Medium Configuration Large Configuration Prices current as of Q303. Two rack-mount cells with 16 Intel Xeon MP 2.0GHz/1MB processors in total, 128MB Level 3 cache, 8GB main memory, 16 PCI slots, two 36GB disk drives, service processor, 36U cabinet, Windows 2003 Enterprise Edition OS license with three-year support and 5 9 three-year on-site/four-hour response hardware warranty As above, but with 24 Intel Xeon MP 2.0GHz/2MB processors, 32GB main memory and 24 PCI slots As above, but with four cells, 32 Intel Xeon MP 2.8GHz/2MB processors, 64GB main memory and 32 PCI slots Prices are provided only as a guide. Gartner accepts no responsibility for their accuracy. GSA Pricing Yes. Competitors $136,000 $345,000 $460,000 The ES7000/500 Series primary competitor is the IBM xseries 445 (x445), successor to the x440. Bull s NovaScale is also modular and scales up, though it s built around Intel s Itanium 2 (Madison) architecture only. Both Bull and IBM support Linux as well as Windows. Support for Linux on the ES7000 is provided through SuSE, but the popular Red Hat Linux distributions are not officially supported. Table 5: Competitive Comparison: Unisys ES7000 Aries/Orion 500 Cell-Based Servers Unisys ES7000/500 Bull NovaScale IBM xseries 445 Processors Intel Xeon MP Intel Itanium 2 (1.3GHz, 1.4GHz, Supported (2.0GHz, 1.5GHz) 2.8GHz) Intel Xeon MP (2.0GHz, 2.8GHz) 28 October

13 Table 5: Competitive Comparison: Unisys ES7000 Aries/Orion 500 Cell-Based Servers Unisys ES7000/500 Bull NovaScale IBM xseries 445 Min./Max. Number of Processors Supported Maximum Memory Available I/O Slots Form Factor Operating Systems Supported Type of Partitioning Supported Maximum Number of Partitions Supported Partition Granularity Dynamic Reconfiguratio n of Partitions (1) 64GB 128GB 64GB 4-32 PCI 8-20 PCI-X 6-24 Rack-mount Rack-mount: three models (4040, Rack-mount cells: four 5080 and 5160) models Windows 2000 Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Windows 2000 Advanced Server Advanced Edition and Datacenter Edition, and Datacenter Server, Windows Server and Linux (Red Hat and SuSE) Server 2003 Enterprise Edition Datacenter and Datacenter Edition, Windows Server, NT 4.0 Enterprise Edition, Red Windows Hat Linux AS, SuSE Linux Server 2003 Enterprise Server, Novell Enterprise NetWare 6.0, VMware ESX Edition and Server Datacenter Edition, SCO UnixWare, SuSE Enterprise Linux (support through SuSE) Hard; soft Hard Hard; soft (VMware ESX) (VMware GSX) Up to four hard Up to four Four hard (16-way); up to 80 (32-way); soft (16-way) recommended no more than 32 soft partitions per OS host Four Four processors Four processors (hard); 0.1 of a processors processor (soft) (hard) Hard no Planned Hard no Soft yes Soft yes 28 October

14 Table 5: Competitive Comparison: Unisys ES7000 Aries/Orion 500 Cell-Based Servers Unisys ES7000/500 Bull NovaScale IBM xseries 445 Workload Management Software Included (in addition to WSRM in Windows Server 2003) Service Processor with Call-Home Capability Automatic Server Restart Persistent Deallocation of Failed Components Prior to Reboot SPECint_base 2000 SPECint_rate_ base2000 TPC-C v.5 (tpmc) US$ per tpmc Application Sentinel No (optionally available from third parties) No (optionally available from third parties) Yes Yes No (PCI-based management card included) Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Information not NovaScale 4040 (1.5GHz): 1,093 Information not available available Aries 520 (8 NovaScale 5080 (8 1.5GHz): Information not available 2.8GHz): Orion 540 (16 NovaScale 5160 (16 1.5GHz): Information not available 2.8GHz): Orion 540 (32- Information not available Information not available way): 240 Orion 540 (16 Information not available x445 (16 2.8GHz): 190, GHz): 181,280 Orion 540 (32 Information not available Information not available 2.8GHz): 252, GHz: Information not available GHz: October

15 Table 5: Competitive Comparison: Unisys ES7000 Aries/Orion 500 Cell-Based Servers Unisys ES7000/500 Bull NovaScale IBM xseries 445 SAP Sales and Distribution (two-tier SAPS) Information not available Information not available Orion 540 (16 2.0GHz): 5,370 NovaScale 4040 (4 1.0GHz): 2,470 (1) Up to 32 Xeon MP processors promised for the future. Strengths x445 (4 2.8GHz): 2,630 Information not available x445 (8 2.8GHz): 4,800 Information not available x440 (16 2.0GHz): 5,700 It s the first real enterprise-class Windows server. It s the leading scale-up database and rational consolidation platform for current 32-bit Windows applications. By offering an alternative to Unix, the need for costly migrations is lowered. The modular design of the 500 Series means a lower (less expensive) entry point to the ES7000 and answers previous criticisms. Comprehensive and integrated system management tools (Server Sentinel and selected Application Sentinel modules) are included as standard on most models. Unisys understands data center needs and its services skills. Limitations The Windows Datacenter Server (WDCS) market remains immature: there are few players, and ISV commitment to high-end Windows is limited compared with high-end Unix or even Linux. Unisys faces increasing competition in what is still a relatively immature market from vendors with new Itanium-based designs though the 64-bit Windows market is less mature than the 32-bit WDCS market. The ES7000 is an enterprise-class server (even in its modular guise), so Unisys sells it direct. Unisys needs to penetrate new accounts in new vertical markets to maintain market momentum. Insight The modular 500 Series servers lower the entry point to the ES7000, which may make them less intimidating to customers who balked at the cost of a frame-based Windows server. The value proposition remains the same, however. These are platforms for rational consolidation and for customers who need more scalability in Windows environments. Rational consolidation is proven in the mainframe and Unix worlds as a means of making the best use of resources and improving systems manageability. The ES7000, with its Server and Application Sentinel software, brings Unix-like workload management and resilience to Windows environments. And by increasing the scalability of Windows, it offers an alternative to expensive migration to Unix for those customers reaching the limits of scalability with industry-standard 28 October

16 platforms. Improvements to Windows and Microsoft s business practices are needed if the ES7000 is to attract customers away from their established Unix or mainframe platforms, however. Server Sentinel Every ES7000 ships with Server Sentinel. Server Sentinel was designed by Unisys to simplify server management, monitor the health of the system, and provide call-home and remote management capabilities. It provides system management and health checks at the hardware and operating system level, but also provides interfaces to application and enterprise management layers (NetIQ AppManager, CA-Unicenter, HP OpenView, BMC Patrol and Tivoli NetView). At the platform and OS level, Server Sentinel s capabilities include: System health monitoring Self-healing operations Health reporting Security features Remote management Call home System configuration These capabilities are integrated and accessed via a centralized management console that runs on a PC with Webbased navigation. Ready-to-use knowledge scripts are provided to monitor, report and react to various hardware and OS conditions. Scripts can also be customized. Server Sentinel is also designed to minimize server downtime by taking automatic action in response to hard or soft errors. Self-healing actions include automatic reconfiguration of hardware, re-initialization and reboot of the operating environment, or restarting the OS in response to a particular trigger. Application Sentinel Application Sentinel is a suite of software, which currently consists of three components: Application Sentinel for Resource Management Application Sentinel for Consolidation Application Sentinel for SQL Server Application Sentinel for Resource Management can be used to manage multiple applications running on a single instance of the operating system in a single partition, for example. Its workload management feature can control the allocation of processors and memory to different applications in response to variations in demand for those applications and the relative importance of those applications. It can allocate processors and memory to online transaction processing as demand increases during the day, then turn those processors over to batch jobs at night, for example. Application Sentinel for Resource Management can also manage clustered workloads when used with Microsoft Cluster Service, managing workloads both within and between cluster nodes for the best performance. Application Sentinel for Consolidation captures and analyzes information about applications and databases running on the ES7000. It maintains an inventory of metadata to assist with version tracking control. Application Sentinel for Consolidation also captures information about executing Windows applications and their dependencies. This information can be used to identify whether the applications will perform well in a consolidated, mixed-workload environment. It notifies administrators if conditions are not sufficient for running applications properly in a target partition. Application Sentinel for SQL Server includes features for improving the managabiltiy of SQL Server databases. Its SQL Server optimizer gathers historical data and recommends configuration changes that improve SQL Server 28 October

17 performance. It also has SQL Server monitoring and diagnostics for real-time SQL Server health monitoring presented in a dynamic, graphical user interface. When using Microsoft Cluster Server, its self-healing cluster rules are designed to increase the availability of SQL Server instances with faster recovery of databases. 28 October