Niazi said OSS also is recommending the systems to customers that want to run two different operating systems on one system. The Gemini systems will support any combination of Linux, Solaris and Windows.
OSS will ship both systems in September. The 2U model, in which the motherboards are stacked vertically, will ship first, followed by the 1U model in which the motherboards are placed front to back. OSS said the units support Xeon and Opteron processors and include 16 DIMM slots for up to 64 Gbytes of memory. In addition, the 2U version will support up to 12 hot-swappable drives.
Even Intel is getting into the act. The Santa Clara, Calif., company midyear rolled out the SE7230CA1-E, better known by code name Caretta. The 6-inch by 13-inch, single-socket server board accepts a Pentium 4, dual-core Pentium D or dual-core Pentium Extreme. Intel has plans to update that with more current processors—most likely versions of Intel's Core 2 Duo—at its fall developer conference in September.
In a recent interview with CRN, Pat Gelsinger, senior vice president and general manager of Intel's Digital Enterprise Group, said he was caught by surprise when Intel staffers first pitched the idea of the small server boards. "I sort of went, 'What? Why would the market be interested in this?' " he said.
But as Gelsinger soon learned, for some specific applications, customers now are starting to worry about things such as Ethernet bandwidth per node and memory per node. With Intel's new motherboards, customers can create one-node systems but slide two of them in a space originally reserved for one. "Essentially, these are half-size motherboards, so in the same rack space, you can put two," Gelsinger said. "The result is you can sort of mix and match the memory size as well as I/O bandwidth in the same rack density. It seems to be a pretty intriguing trend."
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