|
Since the launching of the first generation of "Niagara"
Sparc T series of multicore processors nearly three years ago, Sun Microsystems
has been very keen on getting other server makers to use the chip or,
if they want to, to take the open source specs for the chip and create
their own variants. It is an admirable approach to sales and marketing,
using the same open source approach on hardware as has been successful
for a lot of infrastructure software. But it is debatable if the
approach has made Sun any money.
Sometimes,
you do things for the right reason and you get your payback by serving
the community. IT Jungle has always understood this, and provides a
broad set of newsletters precisely because they serve readers--not
because every newsletter makes money all the time. Sun's top executives
understand this principle, and in a way, that makes them New Sun, not
Old Sun. (Can you imagine Ed Zander open sourcing Solaris? Or the Sparc
T1 and T2 specs? I can't.)
Anyway, this week, Sun announced that embedded systems maker Themis Computer
is going to be building its own blade server based on the Sparc T2
processor, which is the second generation of the Niagara chips. The T2,
you will recall, has twice as many threads--eight cores with eight
threads each--as the T1, and it also has one floating point unit per
core, compared to the single shared FP unit on the T1. These changes,
says Themis president, Bill Kehret, meant that the kinds of workloads
that customers are running on other UltraSparc-IIi, UltraSparc-III, and
UltraSparc-IIIi processors can now be safely ported to the T2 chips,
even if their applications do a lot of calculation. (This was not the
case with the T1s, which makes you wonder why Sun skimped on the FP
units in the first place.)
Themis,
in case you don't know who the company is, was founded in 1989 and is a
provider of single board computer systems in blade and rack form
factors. The company is, according to Kehret, an unashamed bunch of
Unix nerds, and is quite fond of Solaris and has been a source licensee
of the operating system since its founding. The company was a partner
of Fujitsu in its
own cloning efforts for the Sparc platform, resulting ultimately in the
Sparc64 line of processors that Sun now resells. The company is a
realist and also sells Windows, Linux, and AIX embedded systems and
single board computers, based on X64/X86 and Power processors. Themis
had a big boom back in the dot-com boom and military build out, selling
lots of iron to service providers and governments. These days,
according to Kehret, about 60 percent of its business is on Sparc
platforms, 30 percent is on X64/X86 platforms, and 10 percent is on
Power platforms, and its boards are used in ruggedized industrial,
process control, and surveillance systems, among others.
Solaris
is the driver of its Sparc sales, and Themis is adopting the T2 chip to
move that business ahead. "We are Solaris bigots, and there is no
better Unix," says Kehret. "What people do not always grasp is that
Solaris is an exceptional real-time operating system." Windows is not a
real-time operating system, and Linux has to be outfitted with
different kernels and other code to make it suitable for real-time
applications. The reason why the T2 chip is important for Themis is
that its customers do not always control the source code that they use
in their businesses, so porting it from Sparc to X64 chips is not an
option, even though some of its customers have done this and run
Solaris on X86 board computers.
The
new T2BC blade server has one processor, since the Sparc T2 does not,
like the new "Victoria Falls" T2+, support two-socket (and soon maybe
four-socket) configurations. The T2BC blade will support up to 32 GB of
main memory in eight memory slots, a boot disk, a flash disk, and it
will be available in August in volume. (It is sampling now to early
customers.) Here's the funny bit about the T2BC blade: It doesn't plug
into CompactPCI or VME blade standards, but rather plugs into the
BladeCenter chassis designed by IBM and also pushed, to a certain extent, as a standard by Intel.
IBM is obviously thrilled that Themis has chosen the BladeCenter form
factor, but IBM is not planning to sell the T2BC blade. That could
change, particularly if IBM catches wind that Solaris shops with old
UltraSparc-IIIi board computers are willing to spend $15,000 a pop for
T2BC blade servers, which is what the base price for an entry
configuration of the blade is.
Read the original article: http://www.itjungle.com/tug/tug060508-story04.html
 |
Get Informed 
Subscribe to this comment's feed
Show/Hide comments