Sun Microsystems, Inc has announced a broad range of price and performance enhancements across its midrange and high-end Solaris-based Sun Fire system line, driving down total cost of ownership (TCO).
The continued developments to its SPARC processor family, coupled with the price reductions of the Sun Fire 4800, 6800, 12K and 15K servers, result in 25% to 35% price/performance improvements on most configurations.
"In effect, Sun can put more power into the hands of its data centre customers at a lower cost," says Tertius Bezuidenhout, national SE manager at Sun SA. He points out that while the commitment of other vendors to Unix may be uncertain, Sun is demonstrating its continued focus on the operating system with these new announcements for its Solaris platform.
Sun has boosted processor performance of its midrange and high-end Sun Fire systems by 34% with the first system implementation of its 1.2GHz UltraSPARC III processor, which uses the Sun ONE Compiler R8 technology and consumes 30% less power than current UltraSPARC III processors.
Sun has also added Enhanced Memory Placement Optimisation technology, designed to improve system performance for memory-resident applications, such as high-performance technical computing, data warehousing and ERP-applications.
Sun uniquely supports more than half a terabyte of memory in a single domain in a single system, while flexible Dynamic Reconfiguration of system components allows live upgrades to hardware resources such as CPUs, memory, and I/O while the system is still running.
And enhanced Capacity On Demand (COD) 2.0 - another innovation - simplifies system scalability and provides instant access to hardware resources with no price premium. "This future-proofs customer sites by putting capacity in their hands at no additional cost, which can be unlocked as and when required," explains Bezuidenhout.
Sun Fire high-end systems also feature unique fault-isolated Dynamic System Domain (DSD) technology, which is ideal for server consolidation. "Most customers using Sun's high-end Sun Fire 15k systems run multiple domains, making this an attractive feature. With the DSD capability, customers can add more domains or reconfigure domains - without any system downtime," says Bezuidenhout.
Sun's systems support industry-unique features like Uniboard CPU/Memory boards, which can be shared among any Sun Fire midrange or high-end systems, and can support mixed-speed CPUs in the same domain. For Uniboards with 900MHz or higher UltraSPARC III processors, customers can add faster processors to a domain without swapping-out all of the processors in the system, further ensuring protection of their investment.
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Since its inception in 1982, a singular vision - "The Network Is The Computer" - has propelled Sun Microsystems, Inc (Nasdaq: SUNW) to its position as a leading provider of industrial-strength hardware, software and services that make the Net work. Sun can be found in more than 100 countries and on the World Wide Web at http://www.sun.com.
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