This is the second Libra machine that Unisys has announced, and like the first one, the Libra 180, and like the Dorado machines from the Sperry OS2200 side of Unisys, the new Libra 185 is based heavily on the Cellular MultiProcessing architecture that Unisys debuted in 2000 with the ES7000 Pentium III Xeon and Itanium servers.
In September 2002, Unisys put out a kicker to the ClearPath NX6800 series, which come from the Burroughs side of the Unisys house. This machine had 300 MIPS Burroughs mainframe processors, and could have from one to eight of these engines. It could also support up to 32 Cascades Pentium III Xeon processors running at 700MHz or 900MHz or Foster Pentium 4 Xeon MPs running at 1.4GHz or 1.6GHz, for a total of 40 engines. The Intel machines could run Windows, UnixWare, and an emulated version of MCP that runs inside Windows called MCPvm, while the Burroughs engines run MCP. At the time, the Libra 180 could only support a single eight-way MCP image on the Burroughs engine, but Unisys said that sometime in 2003 it would be able to increase that image size to span sixteen CMOS mainframe processors.
That has not happened with the Libra 185 – at least not yet – but, according to Rod Sapp, director of ClearPath marketing at Unisys, the company has been able to crank up the power of the CMOS engines from 300 MIPS to 370 MIPS, and it is now putting as many as 16 Burroughs engines in the box to run MCP workloads. Each eight-way MCP partition can aggregate 1,910 MIPS. Coupled with a complete system redesign, including new I/O and memory subsystems, the new Libra 185 machine has three times the single path I/O and five times the I/O bandwidth as the NX6800. Moreover, the NX6800 topped out at 9GB of main memory per partition, while the Libra 185 can dedicate as much as 24GB per partition. The machine has a maximum shared memory of 64GB at this time. It can support up to eight four-way cell boards. Two base cell boards must have the Burroughs engines. The remaining six cell boards can be used either for Burroughs mainframe engines or for Gallatin Pentium 4 Xeon MP engines running at 1.5GHz or 2GHz. With all the cell boards populated with Burroughs engines, the box has 10,500 MIPS. This is as powerful as any mainframe IBM is delivering today, including the new ‘T-Rex zSeries 990. The difference is that IBM’s z/OS can span 16 processors today in a single system image and is expected to be able to extend that to 32 processors either this year or early next.
Unisys is pitching the Libra 185 as the embodiment of its Business Blueprinting initiative, which was announced a few months ago as a counter to the over-arching (some might say over-reaching) IT architectures that IBM Corp, Hewlett-Packard Co, and Sun Microsystems Inc have launched as On Demand, Adaptive Enterprise, and N1/Orion. What is important about the Libra machines – and the Sperry mainframes as well – is that the are in essence a hybrid computing environment in a box. Unisys is supporting Java and J2EE on both Windows partitions and mainframe partitions on the ClearPath machines, and is supporting Microsoft’s .NET framework on Windows partitions. Its mainframes predominantly run COBOL, but Unisys has systems programs that allow it to be encapsulated and turned into Web services, much as IBM does with its mainframes.
The Libra 185 has already been delivered to six customers and is available immediately. Pricing starts at $1.1m for a 20 MIPS machine with 3GB of main memory, a five-year license to MCP and 180 other systems and middleware programs commonly used at MCP sites. A full-blown Libra 185 with two eight-way MCP domains (and nearly 4,000 MIPS of aggregate power) and all that software plus a single Gallatin domain running Windows sells for $22.4m. This may sound like a lot per MIPS compared to IBM mainframes, but these are complete systems, not just bare-bones machines. Sapp says that when you look at the complete apples-to-apples comparison, the Libra line is priced very close to what IBM is offering in the zSeries line.
Incidentally, the high-end Dorado 180 has 32 processors and can span all of them in a single system image. Unisys knows how to do this. The Dorado 180 can bring anywhere from 50 MIPS to 2,350 MIPS of power to bear on OS2200 workloads. Prices for this machine range from $500,000 to over $10m. Exactly what software is included with this is unclear.
Source: Computerwire
