Chips: Amdahl and Fujitsu Lead Industry With Eight-way Server Using Intel Pentium II Xeon Processor

Edge: Work-Group Computing Report, July 6, 1998

Amdahl Corporation Tuesday announced it will market the new Fujitsu teamserver M800i that provides the power of up to eight Intel Pentium II Xeon processors in an expandable architecture based on the Synfinity interconnect. Amdahl distributes the Fujitsu teamserver line to Amdahl enterprise customers worldwide.

"Together with Amdahl, we are embracing Intel's Pentium II Xeon processors to provide our enterprise-level customers with the highest performance, capacity and scaleability available," said Mr. Kazuto Kojima, senior vice president, board member and group president, marketing group at Fujitsu Limited. "Customers can now choose single node implementations of up to four processors or, with our Synfinity interconnect technology, grow those systems by the simple addition of more nodes."

"The Fujitsu teamservers with Pentium II Xeon processors deliver excellent performance and value to meet the needs of today's business users," said Pat Buddenbaum, Pentium II Xeon processor marketing manager, Intel's Enterprise Server Group. "These systems deliver excellent flexibility and versatility by providing performance and investment headroom for future growth."

Maintaining their early-to-market reputation, Fujitsu and Amdahl are among the first to announce servers with the Intel Pentium II Xeon processor. The new processor technology is being used to deliver four-way processing power with exceptional performance and capacity in third quarter 1998. The eight-way multiprocessor systems from Fujitsu, featuring innovative Synfinity interconnect technology, will be available in fourth quarter 1998.

"Amdahl's introduction of Fujitsu's new technology is a significant step forward," said Richard Partridge, vice president, Parallel Open System Hardware, D.H. Brown Associates. "To date, the PC server market has been hampered by limited scaleability. The Synfinity interconnect addresses the scaleability issue head-on and has the potential to unlock new performance levels needed for effective support of larger, enterprise-class applications."

The teamserver family is key to large-scale solutions that unite Windows NT, UNIX and MVS. The servers' scaleable architecture and connectivity are crucial to meet the throughput demands of applications such as enterprise messaging, Internet/electronic commerce, desktop-to-host OLTP and data warehousing.

Base models in the teamserver M800i series incorporate one to four Pentium II Xeon processors operating at 400MHz, with a choice of 512KB or 1MB level-two caches, and can support up to 8GB of memory, five 64-bit PCI slots and five 32-bit PCI slots. Eight-way systems double the capacity of the base models.

The new servers incorporate features to significantly enhance RAS (reliability, availability and serviceability) necessary to support business- critical tasks. Enhanced RAS functions include Fujitsu's Fast Reliable Diagnosis (FRD) for pinpointing faulty components; hot plug and redundant fans, power supplies and disks; server management software; cool-running design, which significantly increases component life; and ECC error correction and detection on all processor and memory functions.

The Fujitsu teamserver M800i is available with Amdahl's LVS storage system that supports multiple terabytes of data over high-performance Fibre Channel links. Also available is the Amdahl channel connection for ESCON, supporting SNA and TCP/IP connectivity to System/390 mainframes. This combination of server and storage technology provides a platform that is ideally suited for bringing Windows NT into the data center.

The Synfinity interconnect architecture links high-volume, four-way systems into higher-order, shared-memory multiprocessors with a single-system image. Operating at the 100MHz system bus speed of Intel's Pentium II Xeon processor chipset, the Synfinity interconnect offers very high bandwidth and very low latency, both critical components for clustered server systems and parallel processing applications.

This modular structure provides several benefits for customers. First, it gives the ability to upgrade and expand systems incrementally, so customers can realize the benefits of their investments for a longer period of time. Second, it enables balanced expansion. Memory and I/O capacity are also increased as processor elements are added. Third, it utilizes the economics of volume technologies to provide extra performance and capacity without the price-performance penalty that usually accompanies proprietary system designs.

"Our use of Windows NT is growing and we need platforms that will grow with us," said Ed Eiskina, vice president, DST Systems, Inc. "The modular design of these servers will give us capacity in economical units and extend the useful life of our purchases."

This is yet another example of the Amdahl tradition of bringing robust, enterprise-class technology solutions and services to its customers. Amdahl continues to "raise the bar" by providing products and services that help customers gain a competitive advantage in their industries.