Sidebar: Unisys touts reliability with new ES7000/Windows Datacenter release

Computerworld - Unisys Corp. last week unveiled a new version of its ES7000 540 server featuring Intel Corp.'s latest 3-GHz 32-bit Xeon processor and enhanced Sentinel management capabilities.
But the company spent more time touting the server's uptime when used with the Datacenter Edition of Microsoft Corp.'s Windows Server operating system. Unisys spent two years electronically collecting data from 68 nonclustered servers at customer sites in North America, according to Mark Feverston, vice president of server marketing at the Blue Bell, Pa.-based hardware maker.
The study -- which wasn't independently validated by an outside firm -- showed that the servers achieved an average of 99.996% availability, excluding planned downtime for routine maintenance.
"There aren't many Windows players that can make that type of Windows claim," said Lloyd Cohen, an analyst at IDC in Framingham, Mass. He added that the study "has a lot of proof points" and may make some companies take a second look at Windows Datacenter.
Gary Clark, director of corporate IT services at La-Z-Boy Inc. in Monroe, Mich., said his company was part of the study and achieved close to "five 9s" availability with its first 16-processor ES7000, which was used for server consolidation. "From a manufacturing standpoint, that's plenty," he said. "We're not a bank."
Clark noted that there were some bumps to overcome in the beginning with driver compatibility and storage-area-network adapters. But, he said, once those issues were resolved, the system worked so well that he decided to add two more 16-processor ES7000/Datacenter servers for the company's new PeopleSoft/J.D. Edwards ERP system, which is scheduled to go live within the next month.
Feverston said that roughly a third of the ES7000/Datacenter customers use the system for server consolidation and another third use it for transaction-oriented databases. About 20% use it for business intelligence purposes, he added.
New York-based Thomson Financial is running 64-bit SQL Server 2000 on an eight-way ES7000 with 64-bit processors. The company also keeps 30 days' worth of research on two 16-way clustered ES7000s with the latest 3-GHz Xeon processors.

"We've been extremely impressed with the results with that chip," said Jeremy Lehman, senior vice president of the technology group at Thomson Financial. He said query time was cut in half with the new Xeon chip over its predecessor. He added that Thomson hasn't encountered any unplanned downtime since moving to ES7000s last October.
"For us, the challenge is not throughput; it's response time," Lehman said, acknowledging that companies with thousands of concurrent users making simultaneous queries might need a 32-way rather than