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Vast marketing budgets from the likes of Dell, Microsoft, and IBM ensure the behemoths take much of the server limelight, leaving high-performance computing (HPC) niche players, such as NEC and Bull, to receive scant coverage. Even a company like HP, which spends as much on marketing and public relations as a small country’s GDP, hardly seems to give its AlphaServer line more than a mention. Yet, these platforms have a lot to offer and shouldn’t be automatically bypassed.
We go off the beaten path and explore products from some of the HPC niche players — NEC, Bull, and HP’s AlphaServer division. We look at who’s using these products and what’s on their 2005 road maps.
This week, we’ll take a look at HP’s AlphaServers and offerings from NEC and Bull. We’ll examine who’s using them, what’s new, and what can we expect in 2005?
Last Hurrah
AlphaServers remain a mainstay in many data centers. In fact, HP generates Alpha/OpenVMS-related revenues in excess of $2 billion annually. Alpha hardware alone comes to hundreds of millions a year. Not bad for a machine that some thought disappeared a decade ago.
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“People are still buying Alphas and will for some time to come,” said Terry Shannon, an HPC consultant from Amarillo, Texas. “Alpha purchases are estimated to still be in the double-digit thousands of units sold each year.”
The Alpha family is a collection of RISC-based 64-bit CPUs and computer systems originally developed by DEC in 1992. In the past 13 year, it has earned the reputation of being a highly reliable data center system.
According to Richard Smith, an Alpha Systems Division program manager at HP, AlphaServer’s primary markets are telecom/wireless providers, scientific research firms, healthcare administrators, and financial institutions and markets. Alpha systems have a key presence in the majority of the world’s stock exchanges and banks, electric utilities, universities, and governments. The Alpha/VMS combo, in fact, is used by half of Wall Street, 50 percent of the major telecom provider systems, and 80 percent of chip manufacturing fabs. AlphaServer customers include Commerzbank, International Securities Exchange, Veterans Administration, Dow Chemical, and Vodafone.
In the past few years, many upgrades have been made to AlphaServer.
Recent AlphaServer Upgrade Highlights
| Alpha System | Year Introduced | Applications | Packaging Options | No. of Processors | Clock Speed | Memory | Number of Disk Bays | I/O Support |
| DS15 | 2003 | Workgroup server and workstation | Desktop, 3U, or rackmount | 1 | Alpha EV68, 1 GHz | 0.5 to 4 GB ECC | 2 | 4 64-bit/33 MHz slots or 2 64-bit/66 MHz slots |
| DS25 | 2002 | Tower, 5U, or rackmount | 1 or 2 | Alpha EV68, 1 GHz | 0.5 to 16 GB ECC | 6 | 6x 64-bit PCI slots | |
| ES45 | 2002 | Departmental server | Tower, pedestal, 8U, or rackmount | 1 to 4 | Alpha EV68 1.25 GHz | 1 to 32 GB ECC | 12 | 10×64-bit PCI slots |
| ES47 | 2003 | Departmental server | Tower, 4U to 8U, or rackmount | 2 tower, 2 or 4 rack | Alpha EV 7, 1 or 1.15 GHz | 1 to 32 GB ECC | 8 | 26 PCI0X slots, 6 PCI slots, 4 AGP 4X slots |
| ES80 | 2003 | Departmental server | Tower, 4U to 16U, and rackmount | 2, 4, 6 or 8 | Alpha EV7, 1 or 1.15 GHz | 1 to 64 GB ECC | 16 | 52 PCI-X slots, 12 PCI slots, 8 AGP 4X slots |
| GS1280 | 2003 | Enterprise server | 20U, rackmount to multiple racks | 2 to 64 | Alpha EV 7, 1.15 or 1.3 GHz | 1 to 512 GB ECC | 128 | 512 PCI-X slots, 192 PCI slots, 64 AGP 4X slots |
“The biggest recent change occurred in August of 2004,” said Smith. “We increased the speed of the EV7 processor to 1.3 GHz from 1.15 GHz for our GS1280, and to 1.15 GHz from 1.0 GHz for the AlphaServer ES47 and ES80.”
These improvements, however, represent a last hurrah for AlphaServer. HP has no further plans to upgrade the line. According to Keith Parris, a disaster recovery specialist at HP, the company plans to continue selling new Alpha systems through 2006. That means the hardware will be supported through at least 2011, per HP’s current policy.
Why is HP dumping such a workhorse HPC platform? For one thing, Alpha has always been a relatively high-end system. Those that know it seem to love it, but it has lost ground in the onslaught of less-expensive Wintel and Unix systems. The Intel Itanium 2 processor is now seen as a more viable alternative.So HP is gambling that making OpenVMS available on a more affordable platform will give the operating system, and in effect the server line, a new lease of life.
“The OpenVMS operating system is about to be introduced on Integrity (Itanium) systems,” said Smith. “We are also about to introduce mixed clusters of Alpha and Integrity systems running the OpenVMS operating system.”
HP will soon be making an announcement about OpenVMS on Itanium 2, and a mixed cluster announcement is expected some time in February.
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