Businesses give Sun Fire performance the thumbs up

Sun Microsystems reports healthy market acceptance and support for its Sun Fire V490 and Sun Fire V890 servers. Launched just months ago, the UltraSPARC IV and Solaris operating system-based systems use Chip Multithreading technology to deliver application server and decision support platforms that Sun says contributes to a reduction in the cost and complexity of doing business.

Sun's Chip Multithreading (CMT) technology doubles application throughput in the same physical footprint, and makes upgrading to UltraSPARC IV-based systems very easy. CMT can protect customer investments in both software and skills while maintaining full binary compatibility.

"Sun is really turning up the volume and showing the market that it remains serious about the SPARC roadmap," says Vernon Turner, Group Vice-President, General Manager, IDC. "The performance enhancements we're seeing from UltraSPARC III to UltraSPARC IV along with Sun's commitment to binary compatibility are the leading factors for the current success. The long-term system roadmap that includes radical new chip designs running Solaris 10 has also generated a lot of pent-up excitement and demand."

Companies that have reported enthusiastic results following evaluations include Xerox, ESRI and Sylantro, says Helen Constantinides, Practice Lead: Datacentre and Storage, Sun Microsystems sub-Saharan Africa.

"The Sun Fire V890 server delivers the best price/performance with world-record benchmark performance on several tests, including the Lotus Domino R6i Notes benchmark. It set a triple world-record in the eight processor class of systems for best performance, highest number of users per CPU, and best price/performance," she says.

The price/performance and throughput advantages of the Sun Fire V890 server, coupled with the system's reliability and availability on the Solaris 10 operating system, is what sold Xerox Corporation on the new systems.

"Our benchmarks have shown that the Sun Fire V890 Server is up to 1.9 times faster than the current Sun Fire V880 Server with only a slight price premium," says Rich Lauria, Manager of Xerox's Production Controller Development Unit. "With this new multi-core technology, we are now able to offer our customers improved scalability and better price/performance options."

Highly dependent on scalability and throughput, ESRI, the world leader in the geographic information system (GIS) software industry, found that its high expectations of Sun's V890 server scalability were met.

"We tested with two CPUs, then four, then eight and went from generating about 4 000 maps to 14 000. Systems management was a breeze; we were consistently able to reconfigure in a lights-out data centre from a remote location," says Ian Sims, ESRI ArcGIS Server Test Team.

Sylantro Systems offered similar accolades: "Sylantro's global telco and CLEC customers demand top-end performance for their mission-critical hosted VOIP service offerings," says Bernard Gutnick, Vice-President of Product Marketing for Sylantro, the leading provider of next-generation network application feature servers for the hosted communications marketplace.

"The Sun Fire V490 Server enables providers to offer more services on a single platform, thereby reducing system complexity and operational costs, while maintaining the carrier-grade scalability and reliability necessary for these deployments."

"The positive response that these systems have received from end-users and partners alike reinforces our belief in the importance of Chip Multithreading to achieve exponential performance gains," continues Constantinides. "The new four- and eight-way servers round out the UltraSPARC IV system family which now includes entry-level, midrange and high-end options. This is the first step in the Solaris OS for SPARC architecture roadmap to deliver on the promise of throughput computing to meet the needs of demanding network computing applications," she concludes.