Sun Microsystems SA today launched its midframe offering Sun Fire, billed as the world's fastest Web server, to the local market.
Since its US debut in March, Sun Fire has already set four world records, including the SPECweb99 benchmark*, making it the fastest Web Server in the world.
At the launch, Carolyn McClain, director, strategy and product marketing, computer systems at Sun Microsystems Inc in the US, said as there is no stopping the momentum of the Internet and resultant growth of the network economy, companies need to ensure their data centres can cope.
"With the announcement of the Sun Fire, we are helping businesses to achieve this, through enabling the building of an n-tier architecture for any size data center that can scale seamlessly as the business grows," says McClain.
The Sun Fire technology is designed to assist businesses in taking advantage of the economic benefits of the worldwide build out of the Internet infrastructure.
Sun's latest world record saw the Sun Fire 4800 server raising the bar of Internet performance, with 8,739 simultaneous connections. The SPECweb99 benchmark results indicate Sun Fire is the fastest server globally outshining both IBM and HP.
Another world record sees Sun Fire using the Oracle Application Standard Benchmark (OASB) running 16 016 users, with an average response time of 1,011 seconds.
Stefano Matiello, managing director at Sun Microsystems SA comments: "As a leader of technology, we are continually delivering leading edge products in support of our stated strategy to provide massive scalability; reduced complexity and continuous availability - all critical for businesses to run successfully in the e-business global market."
*SPECweb 99 is an acknowledged worldwide standard for web server performance evaluation. It represents the number of simultaneous connections the web server can support using the predefined workload. The SPECweb 99 reflects real-world usage simulating accesses to a web service provider, where the server supports home pages for a number of different users.
Sun Fire Midframe: The difference is Uptime
Called Midframe servers, Sun Fire incorporates features from the traditional mainframe - long known for its robust features that makes it highly reliable, but extremely expensive. The four new systems, available now, rewrite the rules for this class of system.
The Sun Fire servers include several innovations-- new to this class of system - designed to deliver a balanced array of performance measures tuned to the needs of network computing along with superior levels of availability.
At the core of the servers' unprecedented availability levels is the Sun Fireplane interconnection or backplane. This fully-redundant backplane - a design "first" for this class of system - enables fault-isolated partitioning and dynamic partitioning in a full production environment. This ability to split the computer into separate domains enables customers the ability to design midrange systems with unprecedented levels of security, fault tolerance, uptime and flexibility in accommodating system growth or varying service demands. Its cable-free design gives the Sun Fireplane interconnect greater bandwidth for more predictable performance and lower latency, which results in higher application performance. At 9.6 GB/sec sustained performance, the Sun Fireplane interconnect offers nearly five times the throughput of IBM's P680 system.
The Sun Fire systems are the only servers in this new class to offer online upgradability, which further contributes to maximum uptime. "Hot" CPU upgrades, I/O and memory upgrades, and the ability to modify core components of the Solaris Operating Environment will create shorter maintenance windows, which lead to higher uptime and service levels. In addition, the systems allow for concurrent maintenance, enabling repairs while the system - and applications - are up and running. This is the equivalent of a car that can have its oil changed and engine tuned while running down the freeway at high speed.
As a complement to the redundant interconnect, all hardware components - from data and memory paths, system controller and power, to cooling and even the clock - are fully redundant, in effect delivering systems with no single point of hardware failure. Comparatively, if something as simple as the clock fails in a million-dollar HP Superdome or an IBM P680, the system dies.
The Sun servers also feature end-to-end ECC (error checking correction code) for parity checking on data, address and external cache.
The Sun Fire servers ship with Sun Management Center software, a rich, powerful and efficient web-based management tool that provides a central point for managing and monitoring all aspects of Sun servers. In addition to increasing efficiency, Sun Management Center software assists the customer by providing sophisticated system analysis, instrumentation and configuration management.
The application performance leadership champion of the real world
A balanced system design and advances within the UltraSPARC III processor are central to the systems' outstanding and predictable performance. For example, the memory controller, usually a separate chip, is now integrated into the CPU, making the system inherently faster and more reliable. In addition, separate address and data paths on the interconnect dedicate bandwidth to data transfers, vastly speeding internal data handling, resulting in higher system performance.
The results of such advances are "industry bests" for real world business, technical and high performance computing applications, including: - a new world-record benchmark for Oracle Applications - a new industry record for Peoplesoft Financials - a new record for a system in its class on the supercomputing Linpack benchmark - industry-leading Java application performance on the SPECjbb 2000 benchmark
Unparalleled investment protection
Like the successful Sun Enterprise mid-range servers, all of the Sun Fire systems share a common system architecture and have interchangeable components - from system boards to power supplies - a design innovation still unmatched in the industry. This common component approach gives customers the ability to redistribute capacity across different servers for flexible and efficient utilisation of resources, while providing unparalleled investment protection.
Sun extends this investment protection even further by allowing customers to upgrade from an 8-way Sun Fire 3800, for example, by simply moving all major components to a larger Sun Fire chassis. Sun also offers a flexible array of acquisition options, including a "capacity on demand" purchase option and an aggressive trade-in and upgrade program. The systems' modular design assists customers as they upgrade to newer, higher-performance processing, I/O, networking and storage options. Further, the new Sun Fire servers provide support for mixed-speed CPUs, something HP's Superdome or IBM's P680 cannot.
Unlike migration migraines faced by users signing up to transition to unproven Merced, McKinley or Monterey technologies, Sun continues to protect the investment of its installed base, not only maintaining the 100 percent binary compatibility for Solaris Operating Environment-based applications, but backing this up by offering an application guarantee with the Solaris 8 Operating Environment.
All Sun servers come standard with the Solaris Operating Environment.
Share
Editorial contacts