Digital Equipment Corp’s supremacy with its VAXclusters has been widely acknowledged by the industry, but a Unix equivalent has been a long time coming. TruCluster, launched with great fanfares in New York last week (CI No 2,892) is DEC’s second stage along the way, the first, AdvantageCluster, came out two years ago (CI No 2,392), but there are still things missing, most notably a clustered file system, one of the lynchpins of the VAX offerings. Even so, the low-latency, high-bandwidth properties of its new Memory Channel, licensed from Encore Computer Corp but enhanced by DEC in the area of structured communications for error survival, have enabled DEC to claim the world record TPC-C benchmarking result – 30,390 tpm-C at $305 per tpm-C running 64- bit Oracle Parallel Server on four clustered AlphaServer 8400s, each with eight processors. The previous record holder was a proprietary Tandem Himalaya K10000 with 112 processors, which managed 20,918 tpm-C at $1,151 per tpm-C.
The only option
The Memory Channel is connected to individual nodes via the PCI bus. Native connections for very high performance may also become available over time. Four clustered nodes is the current limit, but a second Memory Channel release, set for later this year, increases it to eight. TruCluster components include Available Server for failover and rapid file recovery; Distributed Lock Manager for synchronizing data across the cluster among multiple users and Distributed Available Disk for SCSI storage access across all nodes. The Oracle Corp database, which uses DEC’s Distributed Lock Manager technology, is currently the only option, though others are expected to follow. Informix Corp, which expects to have an OnLine port ready for TruCluster by the fourth quarter, expects to achieve a TPC benchmark figure in excess of 50,000 tpm-C, a result, it says, of its more efficient XPS parallel architecture that circumvents the distributed lock manager. Information Builders Inc plans to build TruClusters support into its EDA middleware and Focus decision support software, and BEA Systems Inc says it has already fully integrated its Tuxedo transaction processing monitor into TruCluster. Customers working with early versions of the technology include Ottowa-based TMI Communications Inc, which has tested failover times of 39 seconds on an 8Gb database, and Baxter Health Care Inc of Chicago, Illinois, which says it is building the largest SAP AG R3 site in the world, an anticipated 400Gb transaction processing database application. The promised native clustered file system is likely to emerge next year. TruCluster software is $15,000 per server on AlphaServer 2000s, $30,000 per server on 8000 series boxes. The Memory Channel interconnect is $3,000 per server and a Memory Channel hub, needed for clusters of three or more, is $7,000.
