Like the prior ClearPath Plus machines, the new Dorado line of machines, which run the OS2200 operating system, are based on the Cellular MultiProcessing (CMP) architecture that Unisys created for its ES7000 Wintel enterprise servers.
Unisys is announcing three machines in the Dorado family, which are revamped models of the ClearPath Plus 7800 series that first debuted in April 2002.
The first machine in the new line is the Dorado 110, which Unisys hopes will allow it to target smaller Sperry shops who do not need the scope of processing capacity that the ClearPath Plus line has offered to date. While the ClearPath Plus 7812 was launched a year ago as an entry machine, it had a base power of about 50 MIPS. This is a lot of capacity for modestly sized mainframe shops, of which there are many thousands in the world across the IBM, Unisys, Hitachi, Amdahl, and Siemens installed bases.
The Dorado 110 includes two Sperry CMOS engines, one that is activated and supplies 10 MIPS or 15 MIPS of power (depending on what companies pay for) and one that is in the complex as a hot spare backup. The Model 110 can also house up to eight Intel Corp Gallatin Pentium 4 Xeon processors (running at either 1.5GHz or 2GHz) inside the Dorado processor complex. These Intel processors are plugged into the same boards as are used in the ES7000s, and they can be used to run Windows, Unix, or Linux. (Unisys chose SCO Group as its Linux partner, and with SCO suspending new sales of Linux operating systems as it wages war with IBM Corp in a $1bn lawsuit over Unix and Linux intellectual property, Unisys customers will have to look elsewhere for a commercial Linux distributor).
Steve Goldner, director of ClearPath marketing at Unisys, says that a 10 MIPS Dorado 110 with a stripped down version of the OS2200 operating environment that Unisys has created specifically to target small accounts costs about $100,000. He says that this pricing is consistent, MIPS for MIPS, with the street price of IBM’s zSeries machines in roughly the same power class. (IBM zSeries prices, which are in the $1,800 per MIPS range, are usually quoted for barebones zSeries machines, not including hardware features and software. Unisys is not charging five times as much for its entry machine, but is rather providing a price for a configured server.)
The Dorado 140 is essentially the same machine as the ClearPath Plus 7402, excepting some new capacity on demand and I/O features and support for the Gallatin processors. The Dorado 140 has from one to 16 Sperry CMOS processors and ranges in processing power from 20 MIPS to 200 MIPS; it can support up to four distinct OS2200 domains. Up to 24 Gallatin processors can be added to the Dorado 140 complex. Goldner says that a entry configuration of the Dorado 140 sells for about $300,000, with heavier configurations running to about $1m.
The Dorado 180 is an updated version of the ClearPath Plus 7802. That older machine supported 32 physical processors, but a single OS2200 system image could only span 16 processors, which means customers had to partition the machine into two 1,650 MIPS images. The updated Dorado 180 can span 32 processors in a single OS2200 image, providing 2,350 MIPS of power in a single image. The machine can be partitioned into as many as eight domains. The Dorado 180 ranges in power from 50 MIPS to 2,350 MIPS, and prices range from $500,000 to over $10 million.
One of the new features in the Dorado line of mainframes is called I/O Command Query, which is a special tuning tool that can boost the I/O performance of a Dorado machine by as much as a factor of two, according to Goldner. The benefit that customers see from this new feature will depend on their machine and their workloads, as usual.
Another new feature is called Performance Redistribution. This new capacity on demand feature allows companies to put differing speeds of Sperry processors in the same box, and dedicate an aggregate amount of MIPS that they have paid for to different workloads on different processors at different times. Here’s the idea. On OLTP workloads, which are parallel by nature to a certain extent, it is less costly and more desirable to have two 50 MIPS engines hammering away at databases than one 100 MIPS engine. But on single-threaded batch jobs, having one 100 MIPS processors will get a batch job done twice as fast a two 50 MIPS engines, which can’t share that work very well. Performance Redistribution allows a company to buy two 50 MIPS engines and a 100 MIPS engine, pay for 100 MIPS of power, and use those engines in the manner suggested above. No other server vendor is offering this kind of capability, and it is smart.
Unisys, by the way, has been offering temporary and permanent capacity on demand (based on 24 hour usage increments) on the ClearPath mainframes for 18 months, and has recently offered spare processors (which normally ship in these machines, even if customers don’t know it) to customers as a disaster recovery option where they can use the processors for 30 days in the event of a disaster.
Source: Computerwire
