Solbourne Computer readies servers via TI Viking

Electronic News, Sept 14, 1992 by Stuart Zipper

LONGMONT, COL.--Solbourne Computer this week will unveil a series of servers, based on Texas Instruments' Viking superscalar implementation of the SPARC architecture as the cornerstone in a new strategy of offering hardware and an operating system for specific applications.

The first two Viking-based Series6 computers are models specifically designed for Oracle financial database applications. Solbourne, a subsidiary of Matsushita, is claiming "100 per cent more effective throughput than general purpose servers" for the systems using what it terms "application optimized architecture."

The server strategy has evolved at Solbourne following the company's withdrawal from the general purpose SPARC-compatible workstation market earlier this year as a result of failure to win a significant market share position. At that time the company had said it was devising a new strategy based on servers. The company had also disclosed it's plans to use the Viking, and has been pre-selling the new Series6 servers prior to this weeks scheduled formal unveiling. As a result backlog at introduction is between four and six months worth of production, according to Travis White, vice president of marketing. Number of systems that represents was not disclosed.

Mr. White said the decision to optimize the hardware to meet the needs of specific applications is an attempt to blend the price/performance advantages of open systems running UNIX software with the strengths inherent in proprietary systems.

"In the bad old proprietary days, vendors would offer you a tuned system," he said. The result he characterized as a high performance solution but at an equally high price. By instead optimizing a UNIX platform, he said, "we're offering Sequent performance at Sun prices."

Basic specifications of the new systems, including the 6/700 deskside departmental server and 6/900 high performance enterprise server, include symmetric multiprocessing, with up to 8 Viking CPUs running at 33 MHz in the larger system and four in the 6/700. MIPs rating is about 100 MIPs per processor. The systems use a 64-bit data and 32-bit address bus running at 128 Mbytes per second, and have triple level caches, including 16 megabytes of level 3 on-board, direct-mapped, write-back cache. Standard system I/O for both models includes SCSI-1, Ethernet and a pair of RS-423A serial ports. SCSI-2, IPI-2, and FDDI are optional.

Pricing, not including the Oracle applications software, is $31,900 for the Series 900 chassis with only system board and operating system software. A Series 700 chassis similarly configured is $9,500. Series 6 CPU boards are $19,900 each, and can also be installed in earlier Solbourne computers. In contrast, the company's older Series 5E CPU boards currently cost $8,900. The new processor boards were said to have 2 to 2.7 times the performance of the 5E boards. Sample pricing given for full configurations was $76,600 for a 6/702 with two CPU boards, 128 MB of main memory, chassis, and both 1.3 GB SCSI and CD-ROM drives. A similarly configured two-CPU model 6/902 was priced at $116,600 with a VME/IPI controller and 2.7 GB IPI disk instead of the smaller drive. Maximum configurations for an eight-processor system include 2,304 Mbytes of main memory and 528 gigabytes of disk storage.

Mr. White outlined the specific tailoring of the System 6 hardware and operating software for use with Oracle, including the design of multi-level caches to match the memory reference patterns of the software. Other points of optimization include improvement to context switching code for use in Oracle-type environments with A large number of on-line users. The system disk driver was optimized to operate with Oracles "raw" I/O and socket-related system calls were paralelized to improve SQL-Net communication. Also, locking primitives were enhanced to minimize contention for locks within Oracle, the SCSI device driver was parallelized and some system calls were multi-threaded based on Oracle I/O requirements.

The Oracle market was chosen as the first in what is to be a series of optimized system offerings, Mr. White said, because of the current 58 per cent annual growth rate in the Oracle market.

"We want to grow along with that market," Mr. White said.

He also noted that customer "are also telling use those kinds of machines are good for EDA applications" using large databases. Part of the already-booked backlog, he said, is for engineering rather than financial database applications.