Exclusive: Seeking a Windows mainframe in the ES7000

The ES7000 Orion 540 enterprise server from Unisys successfully merges attributes from three worlds: the application support of a typical Windows server, the scalability of a Unix server, and the hardware resiliency of a mainframe.

This 32-processor behemoth delivers a Windows machine that can be relied upon for high-end transaction processing and server consolidation. It appears solid enough to bet a business on — assuming that one has plenty of funds, doesn’t need a huge amount of memory available, doesn’t need internal storage, and wants to bet the business on Windows.

Partition Plays

The ES7000 series has a uniquely modular design. There are two essential server components: rack-mounted cells, which contain processors, memory, and I/O capability, and a crossbar interconnect that turns those processors and memory into shared resources.

The ES7000 always re-quires the crossbar interconnect, but it may contain between one and four cells. Each cell can host either four or eight Intel Xeon processors and a maximum of 16GB RAM in its eight 64-bit 66MHz PCI slots. In most cases, some of those slots will be used for external SCSI or Fibre Channel connectivity; there’s no internal disk storage in this server, though there are sharable CD-ROM drives.

The strength of the server’s architecture, which Unisys calls CMP (Cellular MultiProcessing), is that the processor, memory, and PCI bus resources of all the cells are pooled, linked by a common bus. They can be mixed and matched into separate partitions, which are essentially separate computers.

The maximum number of partitions is two per cell; for a fully populated, four-cell server, that’s eight partitions. The crossbar memory bus design means that all the cells can access memory anywhere in the ES7000 directly, according to a Unisys engineer.

All partition configuration and resource allocation is handled through the Server Sentinel application, which also monitors the hardware in real time. Sentinel Version 2.2 is solid, offering GUI tools for managing the entire server, individual cells, and server partitions on a physical or logical level.

Sentinel also hooks into Windows, allowing it to watch for memory leaks and other app-level faults. However, it can’t isolate the root cause of failures and thus can’t remediate problems beyond calling for a reboot of a server partition.

The procedure for changing partition configurations in Sentinel is cumbersome and unintuitive. There are too many similar screens with cryptic terminology, and it’s easy to make mistakes by looking at the wrong screen.

Although it works exactly as advertised, the partition configuration process is slow, often taking more than 10 minutes to apply changes. Despite all this, I think an administrator who frequently interacts with Sentinel would find it easy to use after becoming familiar with it.

The four-cell server I tested sported 32 2.8GHz Intel Xeon MP processors, each with 2MB of level 3 cache. It also had 32GB RAM, out of a maximum 64GB. My test started with the server configured into a single 32-processor Windows server. My second test configured the ES7000 into two 16-processor servers, each with 16GB RAM.

In operation, the ES7000 server acted like, well, a server. Applications ran quickly and appeared to do so reliably. Due to location and test time, I was not able to include performance testing (see “How I Tested”).

Memory, I/O slots, and processors can be configured in nearly any combination, albeit in four-processor increments. In theory, the ES7000 could be configured into a 28-processor server with 8GB RAM and a four-processor server with 56GB RAM, for example, or as eight separate four-processor servers each with 8GB RAM.

To me, the ideal partition configurations are a single 32-processor behemoth or two 16-processor servers. In either of those modes, the server is impressively scalable and manageable. Unisys uses proprietary ECC (error correcting code) memory chips and claims to have hardened the device drivers against system-crashing memory leaks and bit errors, as well as installing additional management hooks.

Dollars and Sense

The ES7000’s on-the-fly hardware configurability and Sentinel management tools offer a lot of flexibility and convenience for systems administrators. They also carry a hefty price, especially when you look at multiple-partition apps.

The 32-processor ES7000 I tested costs about $393,000 for the hardware and dual Sentinel servers. If broken down into eight four-processor server partitions with 4GB RAM each, that’s about $49,125 per server. By comparison, I spec’d out a diskless Dell PowerEdge 6650 server with four 2.8GHz Xeon processors and 16GB of DDR SDRAM and the price was $27,641 — more than 40 percent less, with four times the memory.

The PowerEdge 6650 is also more scalable than the equivalent four-processor ES7000 partition, as the single Dell server supports up to 32GB of memory. The total memory in a full Unisys ES7000 system is limited to 64GB; if divided evenly between eight four-processor partitions, that’s only 8GB per server.

For applications where vertical scalability is preferred over horizontal scalability, the ES7000 deserves consideration. Whether in 16-processor or 32-processor mode, this may be the best high-end Windows server I’ve seen (it’s certainly the most expensive) and is the closest yet to making a Windows-based server that offers minicomputer-class features and functionality. Unfortunately, the high price tag and limited memory keep the ES7000 from hitting its stride.