InformationWeek: The Business Value of Technology

Just as important as performance is the issue of reliability--and that's an area where vendors hope to differentiate themselves. Faced with selling boxes that all rely on the same set of Intel chips, vendors are applying maximum creativity to the technology that surrounds those chips.

IBM, for example, says its Netfinity product benefits from technologies used in its midrange and mainframe computers, particularly in the area of reliable memory. "With a much larger amount of memory packed into a tighter space," says Jim Gargan, director of product marketing, "reliability can suffer over time." To guard against that, IBM employs what it calls "chip-kill correction," which protects the machines from any single memory chip that fails and any number of multibit errors from any portion of a single memory chip. It's a component of the "X architecture" used on IBM's mainframes, and the company says other technologies that give those technologies superior scalability and manageability are also built into its new eight-way server.

HP is taking a similar tack, claiming that its long Unix heritage provides an advantage in uptime and reliability. The company's intelligent reallocation system can identify failed parts and take them offline without the box failing. Moreover, advances in memory scrubbing let it address multiple parity errors. Modularity and a range of backup features are also common from most vendors.

Compaq can lay claim to being the first vendor to actually ship an eight-way Intel server, although only by a matter of days. It is also the only company to offer more than one model of eight-way server. Its ProLiant 8000 is an in-box upgrade to the 7000 series, while its 8500 model uses a new chassis designed for modularity. Four drawers, each field replaceable in a matter of minutes, handle components ranging from disk drives to power supply.

Dell vows to compete on price, claiming that eight-way servers are already, like their four-way predecessors, so similar in technology that the company will simply rely on the same business model that has been successful in lower-end machines. Configured with eight processors, its PowerEdge 8450 server starts at $49,000. While direct price comparisons are difficult because of the wide range of configuration options from all vendors, that price puts Dell near the low end.

But that doesn't mean the company isn't touting other levels of differentiation. Its Resolution Assistant can provide free remote monitoring and even dial-in to fix problems. The other vendors, meanwhile, are also bundling a variety of service and support offerings, some of them automated, with their machines.

Shopping, therefore, is either extremely easy or extremely difficult, depending on users' willingness to parse an array of similar-sounding claims to end up with a machine that isn't much different from the others. The bigger issue will be when to buy, if at all. John Enck, a research director at Gartner Group, says eight-way processors probably will not ship in meaningful volumes until mid-2000, when Windows 2000 is not only shipping but installed and tested. "It doesn't make sense to buy the hardware before the software," he says, adding that even by the middle of next year eight-way servers will only be a niche product.

However, the machines may get a boost from Microsoft in ways that go beyond the availability of Windows 2000. "Microsoft wants to become a force in the data center," Enck says, "and to compete with Unix in that regard, they need eight-way servers to succeed. So from a software point of view, Microsoft is likely to exploit the technology to its limit."

Even IS executives who were among the first to bring eight-way servers in-house sometimes express a wait-and-see attitude. At S-B Power Tool Co. in Chicago, director of operations Stephen Wolfcale says his plan to run an ERP system on eight-way servers from HP was scrapped because the machines weren't in full production yet. With no motherboards stocked locally for repair and replacement purposes, he didn't want to take a chance. But S-B Power Tool, the U.S. subsidiary of the $30 billion German auto-parts maker Bosch Gmbh, is using HP's LXr8500 server to run Microsoft Exchange and may roll out additional units to handle data warehousing and other functions. "We think eight-way servers will play a bigger role here," he says, "so we wanted to get experience with it."

Wolfcale, like many others, points to the increased headroom that eight-way servers provide as a major selling point. "We acquire most equipment on a two-year lease," he says, "and we never end up oversizing anything. I'm sure at the end of two years our eight-way servers will be stretched to capacity, even if right now we buy them with only four or six processors."

Enron's Tollefson also leverages "technology heavily and can't wait for new things--even if something better is just six months away. There may be servers with 12 or 16 processors coming, but we can use eight-way now. They open up many options for us."

Those next-generation servers will, in all likelihood, use 64-bit chips being developed by Intel and code-named McKinley, which is only fitting: President William McKinley's second term was cut short by an assassin's bullet. It lasted only nine months--a reasonable span for a microchip.

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