HP's AlphaServer GS1280 Launch

IT'S BEEN A LONG TIME coming, but the enterprise server first discussed a decade ago at Digital Equipment Corporation is now reality. As predicted in SKHPC — in which we've been writing about Marvel for nearly two years now — HP earlier this week opened a barrel of whoop-ass on competitive enterprise server vendors with the public debut of the HP AlphaServer GS1280 "Marvel" system family. The first three members of the Alpha EV78-inside follow-on to the AlphaServer GS320 Wildfire enterprise server have been up and running in nearly 10 field test sites worldwide for nearly a year, and two through 16-way Marvel systems are now ready for prime time. Here's SKHPC's first take on HP's evolutionary—and some would argue revolutionary—replacement for the GS320 family.

Evolution and Revolution
In fact, the new HP AlphaServer GS1280 family represents both evolution and revolution. Indeed while these new systems represent an evolutionary follow-on to the GS320 family, the AlphaServer 1280 incorporates three major technology revolutions which will impose minimal customer disruption. First among these is "built-in SMP." In an effort to build a platform that delivers industry-leading apps performance and far more scalable performance than its predecessor or competitive products, HP aggregated all the constituents of an SMP system onto a single Alpha EV78 CPU. These components include the memory controller, the L2 cache controllers, and interprocessor communications and coordination.

Around the EV78 processor, HP developed an environment it calls a switch-less meshed architecture that dispenses with much of the infrastructure, complexity, and expense of incumbent enterprise servers. By interconnecting dual-processor modules with dedicated memory and I/O directly to one another, HP managed to deliver virtually truly linear scalability because there's nothing between one processor module and another except a cable. In addition, HP engineers did significant work on the switchless architecture to fault harden the environment to make it even more robust and reliable.

Simplicity = Stability
The "Lego Block" approach to GS1280 design provides a number of unique benefits to customers. System reliability dramatically improved through simplicity: since a single EV78 module contains multiple components that existed as discrete entities on GS320 systems, a GS1280 system contains fewer components than its predecessor. Fewer components translate to fewer opportunities for failure, hence a GS1280 system provides a very significant increase in inherent single-system reliability. What's more, key components including CPUs, redundant power supplies, fans, and I/O modules are hot-swappable, and an advanced diagnostics subsystem not only monitors virtually every aspect of system performance, but provides prefailure information that allows customers to take components offline and replace them before they actually fail.

The GS1280 family also sports optional RAID memory, a concept pioneered by HP's ISS group in IA-32-based systems. Based on the architectural simplicity of the AlphaServer GS1280 alone, HP has experienced a 15 to 30 percent improvement in MTBF in the new system when compared with the more complex AlphaServer GS320. The new instrumentation, console, and RAS features further contribute to the stability and reliability of the GS1280 family. Additional RAS features will be exploited by future versions of Tru64 UNIX and OpenVMS operating systems.

Fast and Frugal Scale-Up
Finally, HP is basing the AlphaServer 1280 family on several basic building block modules that provide a foundation for building scalable systems with reusable components. Significantly, these shared components mean that customers need not purchase more infrastructure than they need, nor will they confront daunting upgrade costs as they grow their GS1280 systems to meet growing demand. For instance, a customer can start with the smallest GS1280 system (and its modest entry price) and grow it to the largest supported configuration in a modular way that protects the vast majority of initial investments by carrying all of the core products and modules and building blocks forward. At the same time, the GS1280 is binary-compatible with incumbent Alpha systems, rendering the system upgrade path smooth and free of pitfalls.

Benchmarks Eclipse Sun, et al
The new HP AlphaServer GS1280 systems have established industry leadership in both the SPEC_rate2000 and the STREAM benchmarks, demonstrating their outstanding "whole" systems performance and a unique ability to scale linearly in performance — and nearly linearly in price as additional processor modules are added. While cache-intensive apps will demonstrate little improvement over EV68-based systems (the EV7 CPU uses the EV68 core and contains a 7-way associative 1.75MB cache while the latest EV68 sports a 32MB cache), real-world application performance benchmarks shine on the GS1280, as do SPEC_rate2000 and STREAMS numbers. In the STREAMS benchmark, which measures sustainable memory bandwidth for computer systems, the HP AlphaServer GS1280 demonstrated five to 10 times greater memory bandwidth than comparable enterprise systems from IBM and Sun. Due to the new system architecture, memory bandwidth increases as GS1280 systems get larger: when compared with a 4-CPU GS320, a GS 1280 quadprocessor offers ~40 percent greater memory bandwidth. On 8-way systems, the GS1280 offers ~64 percent greater bandwidth, and on 16-way configurations, the GS1280 delivers ~70 percent more memory bandwidth than does an equivalent GS320.

Superlative SPEC_rate Results
The GS1280's superlative SPEC_rate 2000 results go well beyond the leadership performance of today's AlphaServer systems, particularly in technical computing where the benefits of the systems' technical innovations are well demonstrated with nearly 100 percent linear scalability from one to 32 processors. The vastly reduced memory latency of the AlphaServer GS1280 is a key contributor to this substantial improvement. As further proof points, HP plans to announce SAP and Oracle application benchmarks in the coming months. (SKHPC expects to see 35-50 percent performance gains on Tru64 UNIX applications.) Initial reports from field test sites indicate that early adopters are absolutely delighted with the GS1280 system. Tru64 UNIX customers are extremely pleased. OpenVMS customers are blown away: for example, Cerner Corporation saw a threefold increase in OpenVMS performance during its Marvel field test; the Bank of Austria saw VMS performance double on an HP AlphaServer GS1280 equipped with eight CPUs, and a 16-way system showed a performance gain of 150 to 200 percent over an equivalently-configured GS320.

Customer Assurance Ensured
The new HP AlphaServer GS1280 is one of the cornerstones of HP VP Rich Marcello's RetainTrust Program. While previously reported in detail in SKHPC, the RetainTrust program was formally unveiled during today's HP AlphaServer GS1280 launch. With the initial eight to 16-way members of the HP GS1280 family available today, smaller systems in March, then 32-way systems in midyear and 64-way behemoths by the end of the year (with several per-processor memory capacity increases slated to appear this year), not to mention new releases of OpenVMS and Tru64 UNIX that better exploit the GS1280, Alpha customers should feel confident that HP will be with them for the long haul. In addition, HP is already sampling prototype EV79 parts. EV79-Inside GS1280 systems should be available in late 2004, thus providing another performance boost for OpenVMS and Tru64 customers, and increasing the length of their Alpha to IPF transition window. As things stand today, Alpha GS1280 systems will be sold through at least 2006 and supported for at least half a decade thereafter. Based on past experience with PDP-11 and VAX systems, SKHPC wouldn't be surprised to see GS1280 systems still available well into the second half of the decade. Accordingly, while OpenVMS and Tru64 users ultimately will migrate to OpenVMS-on-IPF or to the Consolidated Enterprise UNIX on IPF, the AlphaServer GS1280 and its EV79-based successor remain very safe bets, and should be more than capable of meeting customer needs until such time as they choose to migrate to HP's next-generation IPF systems. So yet again, HP's "promises made are promises kept" strategy remains in play. As one HP executive said, "If there's a problem with application compatibility or functionality on the GS1280, it's HP's problem, not the ISV's."

Order Quick, They're Going Fast!
The high-end AlphaServer GS1280 is already shipping in eight- and 16-way configurations sporting 1.15 GHz Alpha EV78 processor-based systems. U.S. list prices for this highly-expandable system start at $117K for a two-CPU configuration. GS1280 systems with 32 processors should be available by the middle of the year and 64-processor systems are slated to ship by the end of the year. AlphaServer ES80 departmental systems with up to eight 1GHz Alpha EV78 processors will start shipping in March with prices starting at $81K for dual-processor configurations (by comparison, equivalently-configured incumbent GS80 systems cost about 20 percent more.) The ES47 workgroup systems also are available now and come in two and four 1GHz Alpha processor configurations with U.S. list prices starting at $39.7K for a two-processor tower system, just slightly higher than the price of a dual-processor DS25 system. An ES47 rackmount system with two CPUs goes for about $64.4K, similar to the price of a dual-processor AlphaServer ES45. Quadprocessor ES47 rackmount systems cost from $133K to $137K.

Pricing Pressure... on the Competition
The price differential is even more significant in larger system configurations, a marketing decision that should attract new customers while causing major headaches at IBM and Sun Microsystems. Case in point: when compared with an eight-processor GS320, an eight-processor GS1280 is priced 60 percent lower than its predecessor; a 16-CPU GS1280 is yours for 28 percent less than a 16-processor AlphaServer GS320.

An Enterprise Server Done Right
SKHPC has been tracking high-end systems from DEC, Compaq, HP and their rivals since well before the October 1984 debut of the VAX 8600. In comparison with previous VAX and Alpha offerings ranging from the VAX 8800 and 9000 through the TurboLaser and Wildfire systems, the AlphaServer GS1280 represents a quantum leap forward in many dimensions. In SKCHPC's opinion, the AlphaServer GS1280 is the best enterprise server to be fielded by any systems vendor, and we expect customer adoption rates will reflect the superiority of HP's latest Alpha-Inside product offering for quite some time to come. In summary, HP's latest entry in the enterprise systems derby is sure to concern competitors while delighting customers. And as usual, SKHPC subscribers will be provided with more details on the new HP AlphaServer GS1280 system in future issues of this subscription-based newsletter.