By Cat Yong
RISC migration is a topic that has been resurfacing repeatedly in the news as well as IT department conversations for a fairly long time. Long story short, RISC means reduced instruction set computing and it was designed based on the idea that the simpler an architecture is, hence the faster the execution of each instruction.
UNIX, the operating system that is predominantly found on RISC-based servers, rounded off a pretty compelling offering during the 90s, a time when its reliability and capacity was as yet, still unrivalled and which made it the go-to system for Internet startups during those Web 1.0 days.
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| Knupffer |
In the meantime however, according to Intel’s marketing director of Data Centre and Connected Systems Group (DCSG) for APAC, Nick Knupffer, x86-based servers were steadily growing market share. “Soon it came to a resting point where the top-end workloads were dominated by RISC chips, and the rest by x86 architecture chips, which is chiefly Xeon.”
Ecosystem heft
Today, RISC-based servers like Oracle’s SPARC or IBM’s Power can be found at top-end mission critical workloads that cannot afford any downtime, like stock exchanges. Intel’s own Itanium processors can also be found in this mission-critical UNIX space.
But analyst numbers are showing that more and more shops are shifting from RISC/UNIX servers to cheaper, high-volume, industry standard Linux and Windows servers powered by x86 processors instead.
Intel’s own Xeon chips are moving up, according to Knupffer. IDC says over 90-percent of IT shops are actively migrating or are likely to migrate from RISC/UNIX, and from Intel’s view, Xeon is up to the task with reliability, availability and serviceability (RAS); important mission-critical features; that are comparable to RISC/UNIX architectures.
Key also is Intel’s volume economics. “We make a million CPUs every day!” said Knupffer. He added that the cost of maintaining one single fab requires increasing CAPEX to the tune of USD12 billion per year. “As cost of fabs go up, fewer companies can maintain their own fab,” Knupffer pointed out.
Financial heft also means being able to innovate, something Intel prides itself on doing as they have incorporated 23 new features across the last 2 processor generations, and with emphasis on RAS features.
Efforts to carve out competitive advantage is coming down to the hardware processor level. “Silicon, architecture and transistors are playing their roles now,” said Knupffer who also added, “There are dramatic increases in Linux capabilities and Intel is one of the companies involved in making Linux better.”
Legacy and migration costs
There is loss of specialty and expert knowledge for UNIX as more shops migrate from it towards Linux/Xeon. Major Intel partners like Red Hat, HP, Dell and Cisco also have online resources and step-by-step programs to migrate from RISC. Gartner says that UNIX will continue to be in decline for the rest of the decade and Knupffer attests to more database innovation also focusing on Intel’s Xeon for performance.
“The go-to architecture for application development is now Xeon… that’s where the market is going toward,” he said. For example, according to the marketing director, Oracle wants their machines to run on Xeon. SAP’s own HANA in-memory hardware appliances only run on Intel’s Xeon. “The Xeon platform was created to have an enormous memory footprint, up to 2TB,” explained Knupffer.
That said, there are still some stubborn silos and verticals with “tricky old mainframe apps.” These applications require re-writing for migration to another architecture, and industries like banking, telecommunications and travel that use them, are just some of the stubborn remnants that are resisting having to do this.
Resistance is futile?
“These apps are tricky. But it’s getting easier and easier,” enthused Knupffer who also admitted that migration costs are not insignificant. But there have been slow and steady sure wins. For example, Yunnan Telecom in China has become the first telco in that very populous country, to migrate their billing system from legacy RISC/UNIX to Xeon/Linux. The IT industry worldwide is also currently enthralled with the big data trend, and deployment of big data initiatives typically use new installations. This creates another market opportunity for Intel Xeon.
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| To become (almost) one – Itanium and Xeon |
With Xeon and Itanium’s technology roadmaps converging at the non-core level, both will have more common ingredients like shared chipsets, interconnects and memory. Besides Itanium imparting more RAS features (and potentially support for UNIX in the future) onto Xeon E7 processors, OEMs need only develop one single motherboard platform for both these architectures, greatly reducing development time as well as costs.
Mission critical servers keep very high-availability times; any downtime during a migration process wouldn’t bode so well for a business and incurs costs for them. Mission critical servers also have very long lives. They won’t be going away any time soon.
But, Intel’s relentless charge at this shrinking and still very lucrative one-third-of-the-mission-critical-server-market, would now be two-pronged with Itanium and Xeon chips, that are also getting cheaper for them to make.
