Sun Microsystems and Fujitsu Siemens have jointly developed and manufactured a new family of servers, based on Sun's category-leading Sparc and Solaris technologies, with the aim of addressing the most complex processing requirements of commercial enterprises.
The servers, which are the fastest Sparc/Solaris servers brought to market, cover entry-level, mid-range and high-end systems - providing mainframe-heritage reliability at open system prices.
"Some of the largest data centres in the southern hemisphere are here in South Africa," says Royden Tustin, Sun Microsystems system practice manager. "And, like their counterparts in the rest of the world, they're always looking for ways to reduce cost and improve availability of the data centre. These new servers will give them the means of doing that.
"Enhanced virtualisation capabilities, supported both by the new server platforms and features in Solaris, significantly improve workload management and the optimisation and consolidation of workloads.
"At the same time, with predictive self-healing, dynamic tracing and multi-level security, you'll almost never need to switch these servers off because you can maintain them while they're running. That's a significant consideration for organisations with a demand for reliability, scalability and performance.
"Also, telecommunications organisations in Africa are some of the largest and fastest-growing in the world and therefore have an ever-increasing pressure on their data centres. So this new range of Sparc Enterprise Servers will solve most of their problems."
A significant additional benefit of the new range is its binary compatibility, which ensures that existing Sun customers will lose none of their investment in previous generation servers. "Their systems can run unchanged on the new servers," Tustin says.
"It's important to note, however, that these new servers don't replace our existing servers. They're an addition to our offering. They give our customers extra options."
The T1000, T2000 (entry-level), M4000, M5000 (mid-range), M8000 and M9000 (high-end) Sparc Enterprise servers will be marketed separately by Sun Microsystems and Fujitsu Siemens.
"Effectively, we'll be competing directly with each other on the sales side, in spite of the fact that the two companies pooled financial, engineering and other research and development resources (R&D) to develop and manufacture the severs," Tustin says.
"The point of collaborating on R&D was to make the end product more affordable as well as ensuring that the best possible technologies were made available in a single product.
"Sun's Sparc servers and Solaris operating system are the most advanced on the market, with Solaris also being the world's dominant enterprise Unix operating system. Fujitsu have added to that their superior mainframe capabilities, thereby optimising their investment in Sparc architecture to produce an exceptionally high performance processor with exceptionally high availability."
The Sparc Enterprise server range will be available in South Africa in June 2007.
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