Pretence is all very well ...

[<isham-research.freeserve.co.uk@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> ** Dell Reselling A 32-Way Unisys Server

> Each ES7000 server, rebranded as Dell's PowerEdge, will support up
> to 96 PCI channels and run multiple operating systems. It will
> also run Intel's forthcoming 64-bit Itanium processors in concert
> with 32-bit Pentium III Xeon chips. Dell did not disclose pricing.

".. run multiple operating systems .."?

This is a vendor's wet dream, but doesn't impress many users.  HDS
floated the idea of "Hercules" earlier this year - a server that
could adopt multiple 'personalities' (remember Workplace OS?) as the
customer chose - but how would you price it?  I'm reminded of the
many pictures of Europe - the French organising things vs the French
cooking things.

One user said to me: "The hardware price of Intel, the software price
of UNIX, and the reliability of System/390 - that I would buy.  The
price of System/390 and the reliability of Intel - THAT you could stick
somewhere the sun doesn't shine."

Which bodes ill, incidentally, for System/390 emulation on NUMA-Q.

Who gets any benefit from multiple-personality servers?  The vendor.
Users don't care because if they ever DO want to change, competing
vendors will fall over themselves to make it easy.

> At a press conference in New York on Tuesday, Dell execs admitted
> that the PowerEdge represents a failure to persuade some customers
> that clusters of smaller four-way and eight-way servers, Dell's
> bread and butter, are up to running big data-center apps.

Scalability IS a problem, though.  First of all no one will ever buy
the biggest system in your range.  NEVER.  How many 16-way System/390s
has IBM ever sold?  Very likely none at all - almost all users would
MUCH rather have 2 x 8-ways to leave plausible room for growth.  No
system is more scalability-challenged than Wintel - even billg is
known to have actively considered using an implementation of the
NT API set on AS/400 to obtain scalability for the top 0.05% of
Windows users.

--
 Phil Payne
 http://www.isham-research.freeserve.co.uk
 Phone +44 7785 302803   Fax +44 7785 309674
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