By Timothy Prickett Morgan
Sun Microsystems Inc will today outline a series of new features for its high-end Starfire Unix server. The improvements will focus on the server’s partitioning and dynamic resource allocation features – the ability of the server to divide the computer into a number of independent domains, each of which function like a separate unit.
With the new partitioning features, customers will be able to have a partition dedicated to each Starfire system board for a total of 16 partitions in a fully loaded box. The Sparc-based system service processor in the Starfire was designed to support only eight partitions, and it has taken Sun some time to tweak this code and its Java GUIs so it could support 16 partitions instead. The finer-grained partitioning features will work on Starfires equipped with Solaris 2.51, 2.6 or 2.7 and on system service processors with Solaris 2.6 or 2.7 installed. It is being provided as a no-cost upgrade to existing Starfire customers and will ship with all new machines.
In addition to these partitioning enhancements, Sun will also unveil a new a new feature called Automated Dynamic Reconfiguration. According to Jamie Enns, group manager for data center products marketing at Sun, reallocating Starfire system resources has up until now been a manual and therefore labor intensive process. With ADR, Sun is adding features that allow Starfire shops to create scripts written in the system service processor’s command language to match different workload conditions so operators are not constantly trying to do things by hand.
While ADR is a far cry from true automated resource allocation, it is nonetheless an improvement over the current process. In future, Sun will add true automatic workload balancing across Starfire domains whereby the server anticipates workload conditions and adjusts resources accordingly. One of the problems that Sun has is integrating these features into third party system monitoring and management tools, from the likes of BMC, IBM and others.
Finally, Sun has tweaked the TCP/IP stack in Solaris so it can create a virtual TCP/IP network between and among the domains on a Starfire server, what it calls Inter Domain Networking. The benefit of IDN is that it makes server consolidation and reconfiguration in a network a lot easier because all of the network interconnect hardware is virtual rather than physical. This makes it easier and therefore cheaper to support networks of Unix servers.
