By Timothy Prickett Morgan
They say that everything is moving at internet speed these days, which means that customers who are supporting e-businesses can’t waste precious time ordering a new processor card for their Enterprise 10000 Starfire servers every time there is a spike in demand on their applications. That’s why Sun Microsystems Inc has taken yet another page out of the IBM mainframe playbook and is getting set to offer its high-end Starfire customers the ability to buy heavily configured Starfires today, but only pay for the portion of the total capacity that they are using.
Under a new capacity-on-demand (COD) program that is roughly analogous to the similar capacity-on-demand offers IBM gives to its G5 and G6 series of mainframe customers, Sun will sell customers a Starfire equipped with 20 400MHz UltraSparc-II processors and 10Gb of main memory. It would cost around $1.1m, but only turn on eight of those processors and 4Gb of memory and therefore only have to pay about $400,000 to get the machine installed.
Even though, Sun has long since had dynamic reconfiguration in the Starfire line, which it inherited when it bought the high-end Cray SMP server business from Silicon Graphics Inc and has since perfected to the point where it actually works. Customers with fast-growing businesses or unruly end users don’t want to have to go through system crashes or degradations caused by usage spikes, and they certainly don’t want to have to go through the sales cycle each time they need to add processing or memory capacity; hence capacity on demand.
The base machine in the COD setup has five four-way Starfire system boards with 2Gb each; customers can add another 2Gb apiece to each Starfire quad. Customers can pre-add up to 16 Starfire quads to build a fully configured machine if they want, although that will probably make Sun nervous to lock up so much iron with only a prospect of getting paid for it some time in the future. It is unclear if there is a time limit on how long customers can keep COD iron around without using it.
According to Shahin Khan, director of marketing for Sun’s data center and high-performance computing lines, the COD offering essentially fills in the gap that has existed between the Enterprise 6500 line and the Enterprise 10000s. Customers who up until now did not want to lay out the cash for a Starfire (but probably should have based on near-term requirements) can now get a 6500-class machine that is really a Starfire when they need it. The beauty of Sun’s COD offering is that it includes five processor cards in the base eight-way machine that enables customers to set up five separate application domains rather than the two that would have been possible in a true eight-way Starfire box.
At this point, the COD offering is only possible in the Starfire line, which includes a special Sparc workstation that acts as a system services processor and can be told to activate processors as needed. Customers do not have to access more power in four- processor increments, they can do it one chip at a time. Sun says that the average size of the 1,600 Starfires shipped to date is over 32 processors per box and somewhere between 8% and 10% of them are maxed out at 64 processors. IBM’s competitive analysis says that it can’t find any Starfires installed with fewer than 24 processors.
This implies that the COD deal might not be as attractive to existing Starfire customers as it may seem at first. (They already have big machines, and it is not clear that Sun will allow them to add processor and memory cards to existing boxes just in case they need them in the future.) But it will be very attractive to new Starfire customers who might have otherwise been pushed into an Enterprise 6500. Sun says that the mechanism that it has set up for the COD offering will enable customers to download the software key over the internet and activate that processing capacity – and Sun’s billing systems – in a second. This capacity on demand offering really turn
s hardware into software, says Sun’s Shahin. He says that Sun is considering adding the COD offering to its other server lines, but that it is waiting to see how it goes with the Starfires before it proceeds. The COD offering requires Starfires to be running Solaris 2.6 or 2.7.
