Fujitsu/Fujitsu Siemens Computers PRIMEPOWER Enterprise Servers
© 2003 Gartner, Inc. and/or its Affiliates. All Rights Reserved.
DPRO-97941
17 April 2003
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designing all of Fujitsu’s Intel-based servers worldwide. These are the PRIMERGY servers. FSC also
settled on Fujitsu’s SPARC/Solaris servers as the strategic follow-on to its Siemens RM servers, which
used MIPS RISC processors and ran the Reliant Unix operating system. The PRIMEPOWER servers are
designed and manufactured in Japan, but FSC has had considerable input to the software, thanks to its
previous Unix expertise. It developed the PRIMECLUSTER and low-level server management software
for PRIMEPOWER, for example.
FSC has been selling PRIMEPOWER servers (or the GP7000F as they were previously known) in EMEA
since 1999. Siemens was already an established player in the Unix market, so the PRIMEPOWERs
inherited the European vendor’s existing sales and support channels. The PRIMEPOWER servers have
sold reasonably well, selling into existing Reliant Unix customers as well as new customers. The latter
mainly consists of existing Sun customers, who are looking for a second source. Even so, FSC trails the
top three Unix vendors by quite a margin. In 2002, FSC’s share of EMEA RISC/Unix server market
revenue was 5.2 percent, compared with Sun at 35.1 percent, HP at 34.8 percent and IBM at 19.8
percent.
The bottom line is that the PRIMEPOWER business is small compared with the top three Unix players,
but it is growing from an almost startup position in North America. That, however, affects its overall
standing in worldwide terms. The combined Fujitsu/FSC had a 4.1 percent share of worldwide RISC/Unix
server market revenue in 2002. It’s fair to say too that PRIMEPOWER is still restricted to the major global
markets—Japan, EMEA and North America. Outside of those areas, PRIMEPOWER’s availability and
take-up has been very limited.
Technology
If Unix market share and awareness belie the true size of Fujitsu/FSC as vendors, then what about the
product itself? What other attributes does it have besides binary compatibility with SPARC/Solaris?
The PRIMEPOWER servers’ most compelling attributes derive from their advanced technology. The
1.35GHz SPARC64 V chips are around 35 percent more powerful than Sun’s 1.2GHz UltraSPARC III
chips. Sun’s 1.2GHz UltraSPARC III is the fourth iteration of its chip, whereas the 1.35GHz is the starting
point for SPARC64 V. Fujitsu’s technology and its advanced chip manufacturing capabilities are proven,
and it has a good record of delivering on its technology promises. Whereas Sun’s chips tend to improve in
small but frequent increments as its chip manufacturer’s capabilities and yields improve, Fujitsu offers
fewer but more significant enhancements, restricting enhancements to an annual rather than quarterly
cycle.
Fujitsu has not only produced a reasonably powerful processor in SPARC64 V, it has complemented it
with a crossbar and server design that offer very high levels of sustainable bandwidth. The two 66.5
GB/second XA crossbars in the PRIMEPOWER 2500 provide sustainable 133 GB/second data rates for
both remote as well as local memory access. That compares with data rates on the Sun F15K’s crossbar
of 43.2 GB/second.
That’s an important point for the overall scalability of the system. Sun achieves its highest throughput only
if all memory accesses are local and memory latencies increase significantly (by up to 2.1: 1) when CPUs
have to access memory on remote CPU/memory boards. The PRIMEPOWER’s higher bandwidth over all
of its two-tier interconnect, however, translates into better online transaction processing scalability for very
large configurations. Online transaction processing (OLTP) applications scale well when memory
latencies are low and relatively stable across the whole system.
In addition to the high-bandwidth crossbar, the PRIMEPOWER 2500’s maximum I/O bandwidth is nearly
6x greater than the Sun Fire 15K’s maximum. The PRIMEPOWER 2500 not only supports more
