Sun targets Intel with Niagara servers

By Warwick Ashford for Sun Microsystems

Johannesburg, 08 Dec 2005

Sun Microsystems is openly targeting the Intel Xeon-based server market with its new servers based on the UltraSPARC T1 processor, formerly code-named "Niagara".

Following the worldwide launch earlier this week, two new servers were released locally in Johannesburg yesterday.

Sun says the new servers will provide for lower power consumption, high compute density, high utilisation and deliver significant cost savings and performance gains, but on the Solaris 10 platform only.

Organisations not running Sun's operating system will be unable to tap into the benefits of the Sun Fire T1000 and T2000 servers based on the UltraSparc T1 eight-core, 32-thread processor, formerly code-named "Niagara".

Sun customers running Java-based, thread-rich applications in Web and other distributed environments will be the main beneficiaries of the new servers, according to Sun's US-based field engagement manager Carl Ray.

"The T1 is the first microprocessor to be designed specifically for the Internet," Ray told journalists in Johannesburg yesterday.

The new servers are being touted as the answer to the power, cooling and space constraints in data centres.

Openly targeting the Intel Xeon-based server market, Ray said tests had shown the Sun servers were capable of delivering four times more efficiency, 2.4 times lower power consumption, and 3.1 times higher performance per watt.

Although claiming to be taking the lead in "environmentally friendly" processors, Ray conceded AMD is tackling the same problem in a different way, pointing out that customers running multiple operating systems can benefit from the lower power consumption of Sun's AMD Opteron-driven Galaxy servers.

"At one third of the price of products with comparable performance from competitors like Dell and IBM, Sun's new servers are aggressively priced to win market share," said Ray.

Despite the lack of multi-threaded applications on the market, Sun plans to launch an UltraSPARC processor capable of handling 64 threads around 2008, and appears to be banking on the open source community embracing multi-threading in the mean time to create demand.