Intel Corp pulled together a group of its partners to demonstrate a cluster of 16 of its standard high volume Pentium II Xeon servers at Comdex Enterprise yesterday, the largest to date using VI Virtual Interface architecture components and running Windows NT. Concerned to show that its servers can compete in the high- end space, Intel said the various technologies used in the demonstration would all be on the open market by the end of the month. Central to the demo – which Intel’s enterprise server group general manager John Miner highlighted during his keynote at the San Francisco event – was a new switch from GigaNet Inc, due to be officially launched next week at the Intel Developers Conference in Palm Springs, California. GigaNet originally developed some of the interconnect technology behind Intel’s massively parallel Paragon supercomputer range (CI No 3,358). It’s been selling its cLAN cluster local area network technology in the form of a PCI adapter card since June, priced at $795. The new cLAN GNX5000 Switch is the next step up, offering eight, 1.25Gb/sec full duplex ports, and priced at $6,250. GigaNet says it has customers working on 32 and 64 node systems. The set-up consisted of 16 four-processor Dell PowerEdge 6300 servers, 320 CLARiiON external disk drives storing a two-billion-record retail sales database on an IBM DB2 database, using cLAN network to send data back and forth between the servers within the cluster. Visual Insights provided visualization software and Qlogic Corp the fibre channel interconnect between servers and storage. IBM has adapted the way its DB2 database sends messages to support the VI architecture. Next week, GigaNet will run a similar demonstration with Informix Corp. Meanwhile, Fujitsu Ltd and Amdahl Corp used Comdex Enterprise to show off the new Fujitsu Teamserver M831i server, an eight processor system using Intel’s Pentium II Xeon processors. Server vendors can’t yet scale Xeon systems beyond four processors without using their own technology, and this new server uses Fujitsu’s proprietary Synfinity interconnect (CI No 3,345). Synfinity links four-way systems into shared memory multiprocessors with a single system image. Amdahl and Fujitsu say the eight processor system will be on the market during the fourth quarter of the year.
