Profusion to Take Wintel Higher in the Enterprise - Intel's microprocessor - Product Announcement

ENT, Sept 8, 1999 by Thomas Sullivan

With the delivery of Intel Corp.'s eight-way Profusion chipset, the Windows NT operating system on processors from Intel crossed a threshold in its development into an enterprise-class platform.

The late August delivery of the long-awaited, eight-way board is a step that brings the platform closer to the RISC-Unix scalability realm. Upcoming milestones include the delivery of Windows 2000, then Windows 2000 Datacenter Server, then 64-bit Windows 2000 coupled with Intel's release of its 64-bit Merced processor.

According to Pat Patla, Dell Computer Corp.'s brand manager for the PowerEdge 8450, the chipset's delay of more than five months was due to problems with its larger memory, faster backplanes and faster memory.

Jonathan Eunice, industry analyst and IT advisor at Illuminata Inc. (www.illuminata. com), says building Profusion was a difficult task.

"Multiprocessor designs, whether at the hardware or software level, take an awful lot of engineering. As the level of scale and capacity goes up, engineering becomes more difficult," he says.

Now that Profusion is out the door, Intel and its OEMs say the new machines will improve performance enough to make the Wintel duopoly competitive with RISC-based systems.

Several OEMs have demonstrated benchmarks that show as much as 1.5 times the scalability of existing four-way Intel-based platforms.

Compaq Computer Corp., for one, released Transaction Processing Council (www.tpc.org) TPC-C benchmarks at more than 40,000 transactions per minute. Unisys Corp. previously announced 37,000 transactions per minute.

Analysts say Profusion-based servers break x86 processors into the bottom of the RISC space.

"Profusion-based servers may replace RISC systems at the low-end, but not across the board," says James Gruener, managing director of Windows 2000 platforms at Aberdeen Group (www.aberdeen.com).

Gruener says eight-way systems perform really well with Windows NT 4.0, but it will take Windows 2000 to fully reap the processing rewards.

Neither analysts nor vendors will offer estimates of benchmark results with Windows 2000 because the software is still in beta.

Without waiting for the final version of Windows 2000 to ship, hardware vendors plan to target new markets with eight-way servers running Windows NT 4.0, such as enterprise-class data centers, ISPs and ASPs.

Analysts and vendors agree that Profusion-based servers will earn a place in storage area networks and system area networks, as well.

"The engines currently driving SANs are four-way Xeons," Dell's Patla says. "But customers are calling for more power in SANs."

Additionally, because these servers are capable of handling more users, IT departments will be able to standardize on a smaller number of machines for tasks such as database consolidation, housing large databases, Web hosting and as e-commerce engines.

Aberdeen's Gruener cautions that companies that plan to consolidate their networks down to a small number of eight-way servers should be careful. If their systems are used for mission-critical business applications - and for more users - customers should consider the standpoint of what they can do to maintain high-availability when consolidating systems.

Patla expects many companies will purchase eight-way machines preloaded with Windows NT 4.0, with a plan to upgrade to Windows 2000 when the software matures.

"Eight-way boxes are very powerful, but the thing people forget is that there is more to it than just putting a box out there," Gruener says.

To take full advantage of all the power of eight-way machines, customers need to make sure they are running applications on them that are designed for eight-way processing. For instance, it is highly unlikely that many companies will use an eight-way box for file and print serving.

Servers based on the Profusion chipset are gaining industry support from operating systems other than Windows. The systems will run Linux, NetWare, Solaris and UnixWare.

Illuminta's Eunice and Aberdeen's Gruener expect a significant percentage of the machines to ship with Unix variants. Although Windows NT/ 2000 will dominate shipments, more Unix-on-Intel systems will ship than in the past.