Fabric7 Unveils High-End Enhancements To Enterprise Server

Taking advantage of current and future roadmaps of AMD's Opteron processor, Fabric7 Systems announced Monday a series of additions to its Q160 flagship enterprise server.

AMD said the features are targeted primarily at database environments and as replacements for UNIX servers, particularly those running the Solaris 10 operating system.

"There is a very large installed base of expensive UNIX servers looking for a scalable x86 server that can carry the load," said Sharad Mehrotra, Fabric7 CEO, in an e-mail. "The most obvious use case is a database server " servers responsible for running DBMS, such as Oracle, SQL Server, DB2 and Sybase (that) require lots of processing power and memory to reduce dependency on much slower disk access."

Explosive growth in online transaction processing volumes and the archiving and indexing of large amounts of data will continue to drive the market for large and fast servers, he said.

Fabric7's high-end Q160 server with fabric computing architecture carries a starting list price of $144,000. Advanced configurations can dynamically create and provision "fabric" servers with customized processor and memory partitions, networking and storage access. Configurations can include converged Fibre Channel gateways as well as additional processor and memory boards designed for application service modules."These new capabilities expand the power of the fabric computing architecture by delivering allocation tools not available on other enterprise x86 servers, including the ability to define extremely fine levels of I/O virtualization and provisioning," said Mehrotra.

Hardware configurations can feature two processor and memory modules with two Opterons each and up to 64 GB of memory. Fourteen AMD Opterons can be configured to run as many as 7 fault-isolated hardware partitions. Up to 24 1-Gigabit Ethernet ports in a single Ethernet Network Module can be accommodated in some configurations.

Fabric7 unveiled major software additions to go with Monday's hardware announcement. To facilitate migration of Solaris users from Sun Microsystems SPARC servers to some x86 Opterons, Fabric7 observed that it will provide added support for its Q80 midrange enterprise server. As for Sun, it unveiled a new family of Opteron-based servers Tuesday.

Fabric7 said it is continuing to use the Opteron family, because it believes AMD's future processors will enable it to stay in the vanguard of enterprise IT computing. Fabric7 pointed to promised quad-core Opterons scheduled to debut in 2007 and, for 2008, AMD's HyperTransport processor interconnect technology as reasons it believes it can continue to provide increasingly robust enhancements to its Q160 family in the future.