x64 Systems with Integrated Networking Technologies, Advanced Thermal Management, Open Software and Open Storage Enhancements April 15, 2009,
Volume 134, Issue 3
Our new x64 systems...will give the data center an extreme makeover, boosting efficiency and maximizing IT investment.
-- John Fowler, Sun
Seven new Sun x64 servers and blade systems powered by the Intel Xeon processor 5500 series and flash-ready were revealed as part of the company's Open Network Systems strategy that promises huge gains in application performance, efficiency, and scalability for today's and tomorrow's data centers and clouds. The new Sun Fire x64 products start at $1,488 U.S. list price.
In a press release, Sun categorized its server's into areas of service and described its newest offerings as follows:
Virtualization
Sun Fire X4270 server: A best value for consolidation and virtualization in a dense 2RU form factor for branch office and departmental settings as well as for horizontally scaled data center consolidation needs.
Sun Blade X6270 server module: Provides up to 2x more I/O throughput than competing blade servers and provides an all-in-one virtualization solution, including server and network, when combined with the Sun Virtual Network Express Module (NEM).
Enterprise and Web
Sun Fire X4170 server: Delivers the performance of a 4U system in a compact 1U form factor with savings of up to 75 percent in rack space, while consuming 60 percent less energy at half the price of competing 4 socket, 4 RU systems.
Sun Fire X2270 server: Offers 3x the performance at 66 percent the energy consumption of current generation systems. The most compact server in its class, the Sun Fire x2270 server delivers savings of up to 50 percent in data center real estate.
Sun Fire X4275 server: An ideal server for the most demanding streaming multimedia applications, delivering 12TB of raw storage at less than $1/GB of storage, with significant space and energy savings.
Sun Ultra 27 workstation: The only workstation in its class to support the NVIDIA FX5800, the Ultra 27 workstation offers virtually unmatched visualization performance in its class with up to 12GB of main memory and 4GB of graphics memory.
High Performance Computing:
Sun Blade X6275 server module: The first blade server to support onboard quad data rate (QDR) InfiniBand for extreme performance and power efficiency for HPC applications. The Sun Blade X6275 server modules push the limits of performance, providing up to nine TeraFLOPS of peak performance in a fully populated Sun Blade 6048 chassis. Optional Sun Flash Modules provide 24GB of high performance, efficient and reliable storage per node.
Embedded Networking Technologies
Embedded in its new Sun Fire x64 servers and Sun Blades are low-latency, high performance networking technologies in the form of the Sun Virtual Network Express Module and Sun Quad Data Rate IB that Sun reports will dramatically reduce cost, complexity, and simplify large scale blade server deployments into existing network fabrics.
Sun's integrated networking solutions include:
Sun Blade 6000 Virtual Network Express Module (NEM): A high-performance 10 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE), zero management, rapid network virtualization provisioning network module that delivers nearly unprecedented cost per port, 10:1 reduced cabling and takes complexity out of the network infrastructure by eliminating a full switching layer.
Sun Blade 6048 InfiniBand (IB) Quad Data Rate NEM (QNEM): Industry leading solution for intense workloads with low latency and high throughput I/O requirements. Designed for the highly scalable Sun Blade 6048 Modular System and can easily scale from a single chassis to compute clusters with more than 5000 nodes.
Sun Quad Data Rate IB and Host Channel Adaptors (QDR HCA): Extends QDR functionality to blade and rack server compute nodes to provide the ultimate in price/performance.
BENCHMARKS
Sun Open Network Systems have already set more than a dozen world records on industry standard benchmarks:
Enterprise and Web:
TPC-H @ 1000GB benchmark: The Sun Fire X4275 server set a world record for all non-clustered systems offering 4x more price/performance over the competition. Sun's solution uses Solaris 10 and Sybase IQ 15 to claim a two processor world record result(2).
Two-tier SAP SD Standard Application Benchmark: The Sun Fire X4270 server running SAP ERP application Release 6.0 Enhancement Pack 4 (Unicode) with Oracle Database on top of Solaris 10 OS delivered the highest two-processor Unicode result on the two-tier SAP SD Standard Application Benchmark, as of March 30, 2009(3).
SPECweb2005 benchmark: The Sun Fire X4270 server is the fastest Web server on the market, outperforming a similarly equipped HP DL 380 G6 server with more system memory, on an industry standard benchmark for evaluating Web Server performance, making the 2RU Sun server an ultimate solution for power and space-constrained data centers(4).
Thomson Reuters Market Data System Benchmark: The Sun Blade X6270 server module running Reuters Market Data System 6.3.3 (RMDS) on the Solaris 10 OS, posted the best throughput result of 1,540,000 messages per second for Source Distributor and 1,330,000 messages per second for point-to-point-server (P2PS). The new benchmark result demonstrates the robustness of Solaris 10 implementation of the 10Gb Ethernet protocol showing traditional RDMS topology on the Sun Blade x6270 can handle throughput of up to 850,000 messages per second with end-to-end latency of less than one millisecond.
Java:
SPECjvm2008 benchmark: The Sun Blade X6270 server module leads the pack on this general-purpose multi-threaded Java benchmark. For customer deployments that often employ Java Runtime Environment (JRE ) to execute a single application on a given system, the OpenSolaris 2008.11 and Java HotSpot software, offer a proven and stable environment with best performance in the industry(5).
SPECjbb2005 benchmark: The Sun Blade X6270 server module, running OpenSolaris 2008.11 and the latest version of Java HotSpot software, has posted the x86 world record for all systems with single Java Virtual Machine (JVM ) instance. This record-breaking result represents a real-world server-side Java application deployment scenario and demonstrates the outstanding scalability and optimized performance of Sun's software offering(6).
HPC
SPECint2006 benchmark: The Sun Fire X4170 server produced a world-record score on this compute-intensive computational suite of tests that stresses a computer's processor and memory architecture(1).
SPECompL2001 benchmark: Sun's newest 1RU server -- the Sun Fire X2270 -- is perfect for dense HPC installations and comes with necessary credentials, like an x86 world record on a large problem set of the benchmark that includes high-energy physics, weather modeling and computational chemistry workloads(2)
SPECfp2006 benchmark: The fastest single socket system in the world for floating point operations, the Sun Ultra 27 workstation extends the reach of Sun's portfolio of Open Network systems to the desktop. In addition, using Sun Studio 12 Update 1, the Sun Blade X6270 server module sets a new SPECfp2006 world record with a 20 percent lead over the previous best score(3)
SPECompM2001 benchmark: On a very popular medium problem set of this HPC benchmark, the Sun Blade X6275 server module delivers a new x86 world record showing off the multi-threaded scalability of the system, stability of the OpenSolaris 2008.11 OS and Sun Studio 12 Update 1 compiler's support for OpenMP(4)
SPECint_rate2006 and SPECfp_rate2006 benchmarks: Designed for ultimate throughput and density, the Sun Blade X6275 server module combines the compute capacity of four Intel Xeon processor 5500 series with the OpenSolaris OS to deliver better performance than any other blade, setting records for both integer and floating point throughput. The SPEC CPU2006 benchmark provides a broad variety of workloads such as protein sequencing, MPEG-4 decoding, XML processing, structural mechanics and speech recognition(5)
Sun's Try and Buy
Special offers and promotions for Sun's new blades and x64 servers are accessible from Sun\'s Try and Buy program.
Sun News Radio
Dimitrios Dovas, director of Product Management, x64 Volume Systems, joins Sun News Radio to talk about Sun's latest Open Network Systems products powered by Intel Xeon Processor 5500 Series. Tune in to the 15 minute segment.
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Our new x64 systems...will give the data center an extreme makeover, boosting efficiency and maximizing IT investment. 
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Sun's New Open Network Systems Products Revealed
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