Fujitsu's PRIMEPOWER?

Fujitsu?s line of high-end servers for large organizations is called PRIMEPOWER. This architecture is based on the SPARC64 processor and Solaris OS. While there are many models based on this architecture, the latest ones are PRIMEPOWER 900, 1500 and 2500.

The 900 model is the lowest end and supports up to 16 processors, out of which eight processors can be placed on a single board. In terms of memory it can support up to 32 GB on a single board and 64 GB per server. Likewise, the PRIMEPOWER 1500 supports up to 32 processors on 4 system boards, and supports up to 128 GB memory. Similarly, the highest-end model, the PRIMEPOWER 2500 supports up to 128 processors and 512 GB of memory. On the I/O front, these models support 36, 72 and 320 PCI slots respectively. ?

The PRIMEPOWER ? architecture is capable of scaling up to 128 processors

Coming to architecture, PRIMEPOWER provides two different methods for physical partioning of the servers. One is the system board-level partition also known as the primary partition. Then there are the processor level partitions, which are also known as the extended partitions. Extended partitions make it possible to allocate specific workloads to individual processors. There can be as many extended partitions as the number of processors. This gives greater flexibility in managing workloads and more control over the processor resources.

The PRIMEPOWER systems employ the crossbar Interconnect technology to improve overall system throughput and to support the bandwidth required by high-end applications. The design of the crossbar offers scalable performance, which means that the interconnect capacity grows as and when a processor is added. This way the performance level remains constant even when the server moves up in scale from small to very large configurations. The 2500 server offers a peak crossbar bandwidth of 133 GB per sec. ?

Fujitsu is currently developing a new interconnect technology known as Synfinity II, that will offer high transfer rates of 2.5 GB/s. ?

PRIMEPOWER at real estate service

The First American Real Estate Service (RES) is the provider of advanced property and ownership information and applications. The service covers over 1,500 counties and has more than 600,000 users. Apart from the need of consistency, the company required a server, which provided a greater amount of scalability as its number of users and the amount of data to be stored, are rapidly increasing.

The company is currently using an older generations of the PRIMEPOWER server (models 800 and 1000) with Solaris and Oracle on top. RES is running multiple applications on the same system by taking advantage of the partioning capabilities of the PRIMEPOWER architecture. Since the time RES has started using a PRIMEPOWER solution the number of users supported has grown by 600% and the size of the database has grown from 2 TB to 3.7 TB.