Government Computer News
Midrange, high capacity
Expanded platform options and increased power make midrange servers more attractive in the data center
GOLDILOCKS WAS RIGHT. Sometimes the one in the middle is just right.
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Supercomputers are great for analyzing the global climate. And commodity servers are fine for Web serving. But when it comes to managing mission-critical database applications, nothing fits better than a good old midrange Unix box.
“Unix servers continue to be important platforms for mission-critical workloads, with advanced management capabilities and high [Remote Access Services] levels built into the server hardware,” said Jean Bozeman, an analyst at IDC.
That’s the approach the Defense Technical Information Center (DTIC) in Fort Belvoir, Va., takes in providing military and civilian customers with instant access to the latest research. On July 28, it launched DTIC Online (www.dtic.mil), which integrates the DTIC Web site, the Science and Technology Information Network (Stinet), and the DTIC MultiSearch federated search service. The new site can simultaneously search 20 million scientific and technical documents stored in databases worldwide.
Ricardo Thoroughgood, chief of Stinet’s management division, said DTIC Online involves separate networks of midrange Sun Microsystems Sparc servers, which provide redundancy and load balancing for the Web pages, and FAST Search software capable of searching a dozen resources in DTIC. The system also uses a multitier system for Deep Web Technologies’ Multisearch with a back-end MySQL database to collate and display the results across more than 300 resources in more than 20 countries.
DTIC also uses off-site availability and quality-of-service checking, working with Keynote Systems, which runs tests every 15 minutes from five cities to make sure the Web servers and search engines are operating properly.
“We’ve had some very good usage with more than a 100 percent increase in page views in some online resources,” Thoroughgood said. “We are expanding resources available to our customers in DOD and all over the world.”
No news, but good news
There have not been earth-shaking changes in midrange servers recently, but they have seen incremental gains in performance, lower prices and lower power consumption, all making server consolidation much easier.
However, although Linux and Unix servers still lead the midrange market, the popularity of Intel-based servers is growing.
Hewlett-Packard, “Dell, IBM and now Fujitsu all have four-way servers based on the same Intel designs,” said James Staten, a principal analyst at Forrester Research, adding that four-way servers could work well with large databases, large applications and server virtualization.
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