New world record results have been set by Sun's x64 servers on VMmark, TPC-H, and SPECweb2005 benchmarks and customers are taking note. Sun reports several customers have selected Sun Fire x64 servers to power deployments in industries ranging from education to telecommunications to media and entertainment.

World-record Benchmarks

• VMmark: The Sun Fire X4600 M2 server, running VMware ESX Server 3.5.0 hypervisor, posted the best VMmark score published to date, Sun reported. The Sun Fire X4600 M2, equipped with eight quad-core AMD Opteron 8384 processors, delivered a world record VMmark score of 29.11@19 tiles. The server consumed only 988W on average. See www.vmware.com/products/vmmark.

• TPC-H@3000GB: The Sun Fire X4540 server posted the best price/performance result on the TPC-H benchmark at 3000 GB scale factor for all non-clustered systems. See www.tpc.org/.

• SPECweb2005: The Sun Fire X4440 server delivered the best 16-core result among all platforms, on the SPECweb2005 benchmark. See www.spec.org

Sun's Growth

Sun continues to see strong growth in the x64 market growing factory revenue by over 21.3 percent year over year, in Q4CY08, according to IDC's Worldwide Server Tracker. Sun also outperformed the blades market with year over year growth of more than 60 percent, noted IDC.

"The solid growth of Sun's x64 server portfolio is proof positive that Sun's built-in virtualization technologies and innovation sets us apart from other vendors in the market," said Lisa Sieker, vice president, Systems Marketing, Sun. "Whether customers are looking to virtualize their IT environments or build the world's largest supercomputers, Sun delivers technical excellence in design, operating systems, networking, storage and virtualization, fully supported by Sun Services."

Customer Wins

• Blue Sky Studios: The Academy Award winning wholly-owned unit of Fox Filmed Entertainment is using the Sun Blade X6250 servers and Sun Ultra 24 workstations to animate its upcoming film Ice Age 3: Dawn of the Dinosaurs. As part of Sun's Constellation System, the Sun Blade 6048 Chassis hosts 48 blade servers in one standard rack-sized space.

• Clemson University Computational Center for Mobility Systems: CU-CCMS selected 43 Sun Blade 6000 Modular Systems with a Sun Blade 6000 Chassis and 10 Sun Blade X6250 Server Modules per chassis managed by Sun xVM Ops Center software. "They are compact and provide incredible compute power for their footprint," said Dr. James Leylek, executive director, CU-CCMS. "We had a fixed amount of square footage, yet we wanted a significant increase in compute power. By using Sun Blade 6000 servers, we kept the square footage the same and went from 7 to 35 teraflops." For more on the CU-CCMS story, visit the Sun Website.

• Last.fm: This free, global music Website signed up for Sun's Startup Essentials Program and initially chose two Sun Fire X4450 servers, two Sun Blade 6000 Chassis and a number of Sun Blade X6250 and x6450 server modules to support their database. Last October, Last.fm purchased 10 more Sun Blade X6450 servers featuring the new six-core Intel Xeon L7455 processors. "The main drivers for buying...are the compute density, scalability, and power efficiency. In total, we get 240 cores in a single 10 RU chassis, which I think is the best density achievable on the market. I don't think other IT solution providers can compete with that kind of performance," said Mike Brodbelt, director of technical operations at Last.fm. For more on the Last.fm story, visit the Sun Website.

• Marteleron: This telecom services company selected the Sun Blade 6000 Modular System. The Sun Blade 6000 chassis and Sun Blade X6250 server module were selected for the quad core Intel Xeon processors memory and I/O capacity. "We have a full solution running on the Sun Blade X6250 Server Modules that's capable of doing millions of queries of communication per second between carriers," said Mario Aluf-Medina, Founder and Chief Operating Officer of Marteleron. See Marteleron's case study on the Sun Website.

• Northern Arizona University: Its Franke College of Business (FCB) provides a virtual environment based on Sun Ray thin clients and Sun Secure Global Desktop, enabling FCB to provide its students with flexible access to Windows and UNIX environments, from home or the lab, without adding staff or expanding lab space while reducing asset cost and electrical consumption. For more on NAU's implementation of Sun's x64 systems, visit the Sun Website.

• Reliant Security: This information security products and services company developed a Managed PCI System (MPS) is built on both Solaris 10 and the OpenSolaris Operating System, and virtualized using Solaris Containers. Sun Fire X2200 M2 servers with quad-core AMD Opteron processors support virtualized environments for multiple security applications and Web 2.0 portals. "With Sun we get leading-edge virtualization from a well-established technology solution provider with a great pedigree," says Richard Newman, president and co-founder, Reliant Security. "Sun has strength and experience in security and in overall enterprise management. And it is able to bring both software and hardware solutions to the table from one organization." For more on Reliant Security's deployment, visit the Sun Website.

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