IBM Unleashes Super Server

Sun and HP find that IBM is all revved up and ready to take market share. What's under the hood of this turbocharged server?

by Clint Boulton of internetnews.com [October 16, 2000]

IBM Corp. Monday unleashed its so-called Turbo Server — a one-uppance to recent announcements made by arch rival Sun Microsystems Inc., which pledged to create speedier UNIX servers in 2001.

Always wary of its competition, especially in the server market, Big Blue has made a preemptive strike with its new eServer pSeries 680. IBM claims it is the most powerful UNIX server to date.

Jim McGaughan, manager of eServer product offerings for IBM, told Internetnews.com in a recent briefing that while Sun and HP boasted of manufacturing 64-processor servers in their respective Ultrasparc 3 and Superdrome, IBM has created a 24-processor server which is actually faster than competitive hardware.

How is this possible? McGaughan said the challenge of creating a smaller, more powerful processor than Sun's was the met by Big Blue's Silicon-on-Insulator (SOI) technology — an add-on to standard copper wiring used in server construction.

SOI increases the performance of copper-based processors up to 30 percent by reducing electrical leakage among the connections to millions of transistors.

"We're upping the ante — big-time," McGaughan said. "We have shattered a full-range of industry benchmarks for what we call the Big Brother to our S80, which we released last year. And we're doing it with a rather svelte 24-processor unit compared to Sun's bloated 64-way processor."

McGaughan said the p680 trounces Sun and HP's biggest servers on every performance measurement with fewer chips used in transaction processing — less than half the amount Sun's flagship E10000 model uses. IBM is also bringing the server to market at a lower price than the Sun server.

Significant savings may also be realized by UNIX users because fewer chips translates into a lower cost for database and other software licensing fees.

According to IBM, the new server surpassed the world's SPECweb benchmark for Web server speed and the Transaction Processing Server benchmark for raw power. Of the eight standards IBM claims to have shredded, analysts consider server speed and power advancements the most significant. During testing the server reportedly processed an unprecedented 200,000 customer orders per minute.

Giga Information Group Vice President Brad Day, who was briefed on the p680, told Internetnews.com it was the fastest server yet.

"What's compelling about this announcement is that there is a low processor count that provides serious breakthrough performance that puts them back on top," Day said, referring to IBM's server war with Sun, which by most counts, holds 37 to 38 percent of UNIX server market revenues to IBM's 24 to 25 percent. "Probably the most telling is the number of the industry standard benchmarks IBM shatters," Day added.

Day said other firms will harp on the fact that they broke a single benchmark, but that IBM consistently breaks several key yardsticks with the p680.

"Customers don't care about a firm breaking a single benchmark," Day said. "But they will take notice if a company breaks several."

Day also said that because the p680 is a smaller — using a 24-chip processor as opposed to Sun's future 64-bit hardware, it will also save companies space and money, based on a price for performance standard.

Day said IBM was originally slow to join the capacity-on-demand bandwagon, noting that Sun and HP were quick to embrace features that could ramp-up to meet bandwidth demands in real-time. With its new technology, IBM customers can gain performance enhancing capacity with a simple request and a reboot of the server. This can only improve Big Blue's allure with customers and potentially take market share from competitors.

But in spite of IBM's bold statements and forthcoming product release, the server market is still dominated by Sun, with HP ranked second in revenue, which is followed closely by IBM.

Bill Claybrook, Aberdeen Group research director for Linux and open source software, told Internetnews.com that Sun may lead the server market in revenue, but the three rivals are nearly dead even when it comes to the number of licenses held.

Claybrook said IBM and HP have an advantage over Sun because they both produce servers for the burgeoning Linux market segment.

"One of the reasons IBM and HP are much more into Linux is that Linux competes very well with the low-end user," Claybrook said. "IBM and HP recognize Linux's open source model as popular and important."

Big Blue hopes Turbo sales will make it the leader of the pack when it comes to the UNIX server segment. If not, there is always next year when IBM will come out with another round of UNIX-based serve upgrades.

—End