As expected, Compaq last week announced a new low-end Alpha server, the DS10, which has been dubbed the WebBrick by company marketeers keen on fostering the idea that the rack-mountable uniprocessor will be a perfect server for internet service providers who generally prefer racks of small servers over giant (and expensive) SMP servers like Sun Microsystems Starfires or Hewlett-Packard V-Class 9000 servers. It is much easier to tune a small Unix server supporting only a few dozen web sites than it is to try to manage the bandwidth and processing capacity requirements of putting thousands of web sites on a single large Unix server, say advocates of this approach. Call it poor man’s partitioning.
The D10 comes with a single 466MHz Alpha 21264 processor equipped with 2Mb of L2 cache memory; that chip is rated at 24.6 SPECint95 and 47.9 SPECfp95, making it the fastest single processor server in its market. Those numbers, in fact, make the DS10 almost as fast as the dual 440MHz PA-8500 J5000 workstations that HP announced last week as well (see separate story). It includes a memory crossbar architecture that supports up to 1.3 Gbps bandwidth, about double that of low-end PC servers and many Unix servers based on older designs, and three 64-bit PCI and one 32- bit PCI slots with a total of 250Mbps of aggregate bandwidth. The machine comes with 64Mb of 100MHz SDRAM memory (expandable to 2Gb) and 10Gb of disk capacity (expandable to 30Gb). It can run OpenVMS, Linux, Windows NT or Tru64 Unix. The Linux-ready barebones DS10 costs $3,500. The DS10 is available in limited quantities immediately, but will be generally available worldwide in June.
To bolster its position in the emerging Linux market, Compaq says that starting in June it will offer online access to AlphaServers with Linux installed on them so that its business partners can test and validate their Linux applications. Partners participating in the Compaq Solutions Alliance program will also be able to use the machines to benchmark their applications. Compaq also plans to add Fortran, C and C++ compilers and an extended math library to the portfolio of Tru64 Unix tools that have been ported to Linux; last month, the company announced that it had ported its Tru64 standard math library over. By porting over these tools to Linux, software developers familiar with Digital’s Unix variant will not have to learn other compilers to create applications and can stick to their same old source code. (Of course, they will probably still have to tweak their source code to get around shortcomings in Linux or deal with eccentricities between the Alpha and Intel architectures.)
In addition, Compaq says that Debian and SuSE have joined Red Hat Software in offering commercial distributions of Linux for Alpha servers, and presumably Pacific HiTech and Caldera software will follow suit.
