John Fowler, EVP for Sun's Systems Group, and Pat Gelsinger, senior VP and GM for Intel's Digital Enterprise Group, unveiled the new Sun Fire systems based on the Quad-Core Intel Xeon processor on September 25th, 2007.

During the launch, it was pointed out that in just seven months Sun has gone from development agreement with Intel to collaborating around Sun's software platform and hardware, to three Sun engineered and Sun designed products: the Sun Blade x6250 and the two Sun Fire servers just announced, the Sun Fire X4150 and the Sun Fire X4450.

Sun designs for large improvements in performance - doubling CPU performance, i/o, memory, etc. - that customers want. Sun reports, "Many companies are struggling to contain costs and maximize space and they're looking to virtualization and consolidation to provide some relief.

"Virtualization is built into the Solaris OS via Solaris Containers, which provides limitless software partitioning on one license with thousands of applications on one system," Sun notes. "When paired with the Solaris OS, the Sun Fire X4450 and Sun Fire X4150 servers offer the benefits of built-in virtualization in the OS, plus Intel's virtualization technology embedded in the processor. This combination is designed to run 24/7 at over 85 percent utilization."

Sun believes that design is fundamentally one of the differentiators on how to develop core intellectual property in the systems infrastructure business.

These latest Sun Fire systems required significant design engineering across many disciplines at Sun. In contrast to HP, Dell and IBM, Sun is able to deliver the same basic capabilities in a box that takes up half the amount of space.

These new systems include system management at no extra cost along with lights out management (LOM) and serviceability features, such as RAID, hot-swappable redundant power supplies, fans and disks - all of which are of great value to customers both small and large. (See articles [18640], [18689] for specific feature details.)

Currently, Sun and Intel are working together to realize Solaris on the Intel platform. The goal is to take advantage of Intel and the Solaris OS features to actually produce more reliable, higher performing and lower power using systems.

See the launch of the Sun Fire X4150 and Sun Fire X4450 with Fowler and Gelsing in a 43-minute video hosted by Sun. [...read more...]

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