Sun has reduced prices across the midrange and high-end of its SolarisTM Operating Environment (Solaris OE)-based Sun FireTM server line, including the Sun FireTM 4800 servers, Sun FireTM 6800 servers, Sun FireTM 12K servers and Sun FireTM 15K servers. Combined with the improvements in performance achieved with the 1.2 GHz UltraSPARCR III Cu processor, the Sun Fire server line now offers users reductions of 25 to 35 percent in TCO. A further improvement lies in the Enhanced Memory Placement Optimization technology Sun has added to increase system performance for memory-resident applications, such as high-performance technical computing, data warehousing and ERP applications.

"New innovations and continued SPARC leadership enable us to pass better performance and price savings on to customers," said Clark Masters, executive vice president, Enterprise Systems Products, Sun. "More customers worldwide turn to Sun than any other vendor for highly reliable network computing infrastructure for the data center. Today we're showing that rather than rest on our laurels, we're going to continue to drive cost and complexity down -- while taking it to the competition."

"While other vendors are abandoning UNIXR, Sun is doubling down on Solaris OE and remains the leading provider of UNIX systems," said Jonathan Schwartz, executive vice president, Sun's Software Group. "While some customers may be feeling anxious about their vendor's UNIX commitment, Sun continues to provide both investment protection and a comprehensive roadmap of innovation for Solaris OE based systems."

The only vendor to offer capabilities such as support for more than one-half terabyte of memory in a single domain/single system configuration, along with flexible Dynamic Reconfiguration of system components, Sun's innovations allow customers to perform live upgrades to resources such as CPUs, memory and I/O. Sun has also improved Capacity On Demand (COD) 2.0, which provides system scalability with instant access to hardware resources without a price premium.

Another feature Sun Fire high-end systems offer is unique fault-isolated Dynamic System Domain technology, which is ideal for server consolidation. Since more than 75 percent of Sun Fire 15K server systems ship pre-configured with multiple domains, it is fair to assume that a majority of customers run multiple applications and can use Dynamic System Domain technology to add more domains or reconfigure domains while the system is running and in production.

Uniboard CPU/memory boards allow users of systems with 900 MHz UltraSPARCR III processors (or higher) to add faster processors without swapping out all the processors in the system -- another instance of investment protection.

Finally, the enterprise Data Warehouse Reference Architecture (EDW RA) has been expanded to include the Sun Fire 12K server system as a core component, enabling yet higher levels of performance and functionality. [...read more...]

		fullsource
Print Email Current Profile Archive Blog Generate newsletter