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Sun Unveils Refreshed Sun Fire Systems

Posted on: Thursday, 1 April 2004, 06:00 CST

Sun Microsystems has introduced the most comprehensive revamping of its Sun Fire systems family in more than a decade. Powered by the UltraSPARC IV processor and the Java Enterprise System, the new Sun Fire Enterprise Servers set benchmarks in commercial, high performance and technical computing.

The new family of servers combine the advances of Throughput Computing technology from the processor and SMP architecture to the Solaris 10 Operating System, Sun Java Enterprise System and multithreaded applications. These new systems tightly integrate on- chip capabilities with the operating system to enable customers to mix and match UltraSPARC III and UltraSPARC IV processors in their systems.

Clark Masters, executive vice president of Sun's Enterprise Systems Products, unveiled the industry's first throughput computing system family at Sun's quarterly launch in February.

"We're starting the year with our strongest product lineup ever and delivering customers the ultimate in throughput power," said Clark Masters, executive vice president, Enterprise Systems Products, Sun Microsystems. "Only Sun can deliver this degree of integration between hardware and software, making our systems a smarter investment over the long term as customers evolve their data centers to respond to changing business demands."

The new Sun Fire E2900, E4900, E6900, E20K and E25K servers are powered by Chip Multithreading (CMT) technology of the UltraSPARC IV processor. Masters said this new family of servers is the first implementation of multithreading technology. Customers can mix and match speeds and generations of UltraSPARC processors within the same domain, and achieve nearly double the performance without disruption or downtime.

The additions to the Sun Fire family of products provide hot swap and plug-and-play capabilities through dynamic reconfiguration technology, as well as support for clustering and linear scalability. The new servers are based on the Sun Fireplane interconnect, multithreaded UltraSPARC IV 1.05 and 1.2 GHz processors and scalable high-end SMP architecture.

"Sun allows us to mix, match and manage our existing UltraSPARC III uniboards with the new, more powerful UltraSPARC IV processors within our current servers," said Chuck Sears, director of Research Computing, Oregon State University. "We were able to install the new boards in our Sun Fire 4800 servers quickly with no problems and immediately received sizable performance improvements. Our existing applications ran just like before, only much faster. It used to take us 28 days to complete a 50-year simulation of earth and weather patterns. With Sun's new systems, preliminary results show that we can accomplish the same simulation in only 13 days."

The new systems include the:

* Sun Fire E2900 with up to 12 chip-multithreaded UltraSPARC IV processors and up to 96 GB of memory;

* Sun Fire E4900, E6900 - a mid-sized 12 processor departmental server system and large 24 processor server - are aimed for datacenter tasks such as large databases, data mining or server consolidation applications;

* Sun Fire E20K and E25K are 36 and 72 processor servers that are the flagships of Sun's binary-compatible server line.

Sun Fire servers will ship preloaded with Sun Remote Services Net Connect and enhanced dependability features.

Sun also announced updates to its software products - the N1 Grid System, Solaris 10 Operating System and the Java Enterprise System - that will work seamlessly with Sun's new Sun Fire Enterprise Servers. The N1 Grid System provides customers with N1 Grid Containers, Dynamic System Domains and Virtual Machine Managers that help enable increased server utilization through resource partitioning. Shipping since December 2003, Sun's second release of the Java Enterprise System will be available next quarter, concurrently with the upcoming Solaris 9 OS 4/04 release.

N1 Grid Container technology is supported in the Solaris 9 OS, the present version, and will be supported in the Solaris 10 OS, the upcoming version of Sun's Operating System.

Copyright Publications & Communications, Inc. Mar 2004

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