By year-end Sun Microsystems Inc will make public details of a high-speed, low-bandwidth proprietary interconnect for clustering its servers. While Sun’s long railed against the speed bump ccNUMA architectures introduce into the SMP symmetric multiprocessing model of computing, it’s known to have been experimenting with its own (and inherited) distributed shared memory technologies for a couple of years. It’s always said that any environment an application acts in should feel and look like SMP and that there should be no performance penalty for accessing memory locally or remotely. Moreover, the APIs should look the same to software developers. Sun’s interconnect will be its third clustering mechanism following Fast Ethernet (soon to be Gigabit Ethernet) and the Scalable Coherent Interconnect switch technology it OEMs from Dolphin Interconnect Solutions (which it says it will continue to support). The industry expects Sun to try and ship a ccNUMA-like server in mid-1999, presumably u sing the interconnect, while Hewlett-Packard Co’s ccNUMA-enabled Superdome is expected by the end of next year. Of course, they say, Sun’s got much to prove having introduced Ultra Enterprise 4500 to 6500 servers using technology inherited from the acquisition of XDBus from Xerox Corp while the high-end 10000 StarFires are Cray Superservers by another name. Sun’s new box should coincide with the introduction of version 3.0 of SunCluster, part of the company’s Full Moon clustering suite currentl y at release 2.1. It’ll include a clustered file system, Clustering for scalability a la Windows NT is a no-no in Sun’s book. Clustering for high-availability and to support enterprise storage solutions is the reason why users should be looking at it. Indeed Sun expects to share some of its vision for enabling devices to attach to global intelligent network storage at its enterprise computing forum bash in New York next week. It’s expected to focus on workgroup solutions. Sun’s will use the Ult raSparc IIIs Cheetah processor in next-generation servers due by the end of next year code-named Serengheti.
