Network Support Services (NSS), the South African distributor of NetFRAME servers, has announced the availability of the new NetFRAME Systems ClusterSystem 9008 (NF9008 network server).
The new NF9008 is an I2O-ready, four-processor Pentium Pro platform designed for remote office, application server and mid-size business environments. Based on NetFRAME`s innovative Hot Plug, triple-peer PCI (firewalled I/O) architecture, the system combines industry-leading performance, reliability and online scalability with a cost-effective hardware design. The NF9008 offers price-parity with standard PC servers while delivering features, performance and reliability previously only available in high-end servers.
With this announcement, NSS has significantly increased the market for its sophisticated NetFRAME server technology. Previously, NetFRAME servers were targeted primarily at data centre environments in large organisations. With an aggressive new pricing strategy, the company is positioning the NF9008 in the mainstream of the network server market.
The recent acquisition of NetFRAME by Micron Electronics, a leading PC technology manufacturer and direct-distributor, will enable NetFRAME to deliver cost-effective, standards-based network servers with the full suite of management features resident in all NetFRAME servers, at prices comparative to other server brands.
The NF9008 features a number of unique capabilities, including eight individually Hot Pluggable PCI card slots (more than any other Pentium server), a high-throughput triple-peer PCI bus architecture, NIC load sharing and fail-over. NetFRAME pioneered Hot Plug PCI technology, which it started shipping in October 1996 on the NF9016.
The NF9008 is also equipped with NetFRAME`s mainframe-class internal system management instrumentation known as IntraPulse. IntraPulse gives system administrators and network managers a comprehensive view into the underlying health of the server, in real-time.
"By delivering PCI Hot Plug technology today, the NF9008 provides customers high availability features that are light years ahead of other Pentium Pro servers," said Andre Odendaal, managing director of NSS.
"With this announcement, we now offer the availability and scalability features that users have come to expect from NetFRAME, in a system that everyone can afford. Because the NF9008 is fully standards-based, users can add off-the-shelf peripherals and storage devices, further controlling the overall system price. While in the past, high-availability features such as fault-tolerant hardware and software, and online repair and expansion have been limited to the data centre, organisations can now benefit from this level of functionality in distributed computing environments."
"The introduction of the NF9008 signifies an important strategic move for NetFRAME," said Jerry Sheridan, director/principal analyst at US-based research firm Dataquest. "The company is now price-competitive in a higher-volume market. Meanwhile, NetFRAME continues to bring department and workgroup users top-notch server technology with two key features that are in great demand: reliability and scalability. And with the additional manufacturing and marketing firepower of Micron behind the company, NetFRAME is poised to succeed."
Inside the NF9008
Hot Plug PCI - Pioneered by NetFRAME
With NetFRAME`s sophisticated Hot Pluggable PCI technology, users can add and replace individual PCI cards and device drivers, without shutting down the system. NetFRAME is the first Pentium-class server to offer this important functionality. When a new PCI card is added or replaced in the server, the operating system software is notified and it reconfigures the system to recognise the new resource-without disrupting online users. The NF9008 has been designed for easy access to all the critical components in the server. A hinged top door provides convenient access to PCI slots on the I/O board, enabling users to easily swap or add standard PCI cards in the system.
Uncompromised system availability
Despite its aggressive price-point, the NF9008 delivers industry-leading continuous availability hardware and software. The fault tolerant hardware design includes room for up to eight internal Hot Plug drives, three N+1 redundant Hot Plug power supplies and three independent cooling zones. The processor complex, I/O complex and internal drive zones are cooled by a total of eight Hot Swappable, auto-adjusting redundant fans.
The NF9008 also features NIC redundancy and load sharing through NetFRAME`s MultiSpan technology. More than a simple standby NIC scheme, MultiSpan offers both NIC fail-over and the ability for multiple NICs connected to the same network segment to share the load. Finally, the NF9008 features Maestro Central Systems Management software for easy management of system resources, either through the network or from remote locations. Maestro Central has been designed to easily interface with leading system management platforms, such as HP OpenView.
Industry-leading performance
The NF9008 system architecture is based on a four-way SMP host processor system and NetFRAME`s innovative triple-peer PCI bus design. Slower PC functionality is isolated on one PCI bus, reserving the two remaining PCI buses for high bandwidth traffic such as network and on-line storage I/O. Each of the two full bandwidth PCI buses supports up to four PCI cards.
With 400MB/s of throughput, the server provides the mainframe-class I/O capacity required by many server-based applications, including Intranets, group-ware and distributed application processing. No other PC server offers this triple-peer PCI bus (firewalled I/O) architecture.
Availability
The NF9008 is available immediately. The system can scale in place to support a four-way Pentium Pro SMP complex, up to eight intelligent PCI I/O cards, 4GB of memory, up to eight internal Hot Plug drives and up to 915GB of on-line storage. The NF9008 is the industry`s first platform to combine the throughput and availability features that customers have come to expect from midrange computers and earlier NetFRAME systems with the openness and comparable pricing of a standard SMP PC server.
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