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IBM floats Regatta-LE Power4s

Entry-level

ComputerWire: IT Industry Intelligence

As expected, IBM Corp will today debut its first Power4-based entry server, the "Regatta-LE" pSeries 630 servers,

Timothy Prickett Morgan

writes.

The pSeries 630s, which come in one-way, two-way, and four-way configurations, are based on the same dual-core Power4 processors that IBM announced in October 2001 in the 32-way pSeries 690 "Regatta-H" servers and this April in the 16-way "Regatta-M" pSeries 670 servers. The pSeries 630 servers essentially round out IBM's Unix server line for 2002, but the machines will not be available until August 30, with the exception of China where, oddly enough, the machines will be available starting September 27. IBM and its partners are, of course, taking orders immediately.

It seems clear that IBM moved up the pSeries 630 announcement, which was originally expected sometime in September or October, to try to steal some thunder from the "Cherrystone" Sun Fire V480 four-way servers announced by Sun Microsystems Inc last week.

IBM also knows that Hewlett Packard Co will be shipping 875MHz PA-8700+ processors in its entry Unix servers before too long and that it needs a product that can more effectively compete against the HP AlphaServer ES45, which uses four 1GHz Alpha processors and is the darling of the HPC cluster market.

Perhaps more significantly, Big Blue, like all server vendors, has to ramp up the deliveries of new technologies because some companies are hypnotized by new technologies and have a "got-to-have-it" mentality when they see new hardware. Last year's servers, no matter who makes them, are never all that exciting, and this is especially true when you consider that new hardware releases are almost always accompanied by significant price/performance improvements.

Hardware vendors will be relying on the feeds, speeds, and bang-for-the-buck comparisons in all of their server lines to stimulate demand in this poor IT environment and to hold accounts in the face of hungry competitors trying to get their feet in the door. The longer sales cycle for hardware acquisitions and the intense sales environment is why IBM moved up the pSeries 670 announcement to April and the pSeries 630 announcement to June rather than waiting until September or October.

The pSeries 630 comes in two flavors. Both machines use a 1GHz version of the Power4 processor. Slightly faster 1.1GHz Power4s are used in the pSeries 670 and 1.1GHz and 1.3GHz Power4s are used in the pSeries 690. Both machines offer configurations with one, two or four Power4 processor cores active (that's one or two Power4 chips, each with configurations, from 1GB to 16GB of main memory - DDR chipkill), 18Gb to 297GB of disk capacity, and four PCI slots. The pSeries 630-6E4 is the deskside version of this entry Power4 machine.

It will not be NEBS compliant, unlike the rack-mounted pSeries 630-6C4. The tower version of this machine will support a maximum of two logical partitions, a feature that IBM hopes to have ready sometime in the second half of 2002 (we hear that this support will be ready during the fourth quarter). The rack-mounted versions of this server, which fit into a 4U form factor, will support two logical partitions in a normal configuration and up to four logical partitions when an optional auxiliary I/O drawer is attached to the pSeries 630-6C4 server (again, officially IBM says this LPAR support will come in the second half of 2002, but we hear 4Q 2002 specifically). IBM expects to offer NEBS Level 3 compliance and 48v DC power support sometime in the third quarter of 2002.

The pSeries 630 will support the AIX 5L operating system when release 5.2 is available later this year, but the AIX 5.1 release will also be backcast onto the machines at that time. AIX 5.1 is not available on the boxes now. AIX 4.3.3 is not supported on these Power4 servers, or indeed any Power4 machines. IBM says that it expects that the commercial Linux distributors that it has marketing relationships with, including SuSE AG, Turbolinux, and Red Hat, will deliver native Linux support for the pSeries 630 machines sometime in the third quarter. IBM doesn't pre-install Linux on these machines, so the schedule is really determined by the Linux distributors, not Big Blue. IBM says that it will tweak the pSeries 630 sometime during the third quarter so it can support Linux as the sole operating system on the machines.

The pSeries 630 servers are intended to be kickers to the pSeries 640 "Conan" rack-mounted servers and the RS/6000 Model 270-44P tower servers. These older machines are based on IBM's 375MHz and 460MHz Power3 RISC processors, and offer one, two, or four processor configurations and up to 16GB of main memory as well.

On IBM's rPerf relative performance metric, which is a composite benchmark that is aimed at illustrating the performance customers using these machines for commercial transaction processing might expect, the two-way pSeries 630 with the 1GHz and 1.44MB of L2 cache and 32MB of L3 cache has a relative performance of 5.07. The RS/6000 Model 270-44P and pSeries 640 server with four 450MHz Power3-II processors and 8MB of L2 cache per processor is rated at 4.01 on the rPerf scale. The Power4-based machine, with more than twice the aggregate clock cycles, is only able to do 26% more work. This just goes to show how L2 cache intensive some benchmarks are.

However, Unix customers are probably not going to be too upset about this considering the aggressive pricing IBM has put in place on the pSeries 630s. A base pSeries 630 with a single 1GHz processor, 1GB of main memory, 18GB of disk and a CD drive costs $14,120. An additional Power4 processor for the first of two CPU/memory cards in the pSeries 630 chassis costs $5,000; a whole two-way card costs $11,000. So a four-way machine with base memory and disk will cost $30,120.

A four-way pSeries 680 with 450MHz Power3-II processors and 1GB of memory and 18GB of disk has a list price of $42,477, and the four-way Model 270-44P tower server with the same hardware inside sells for $50,618. The older Power3-based servers offer a bang for the buck in the range of about $10,000 per rPerf, while the new Power4-based entry servers come in at about $6,000 per rPerf. That's an improvement of about 43% in price/performance, which is about as good as it ever gets in the Unix server market. However, the price/performance improvements and price of the pSeries 630 is not nearly as good compared to the deskside pSeries 620 and rack-mounted pSeries 660 servers IBM has been selling for quite a while.

These machines are based on 600MHz and 750MHz PowerPC S-Star processors. Chip for chip, the 750MHz S-Stars in the pSeries 620 and 660 servers will outperform the Power4-based pSeries 630 servers by 13%, 15%, and 31% for one-, two-, and four-processor configurations on IBM's rPerf test. Nonetheless, because of IBM's aggressive pricing, the Power4-based pSeries 630s will offer about 20 percent better price/performance than the pSeries 620/660 machines.

© ComputerWire

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