Sun Unveils Three Groundbreaking Servers, Including World's First Enterprise-Class 4U, 16-Way x64 System

Published 17th July 2006

Also breaks US$2/GB storage barrier and introduces market's most advanced high-end x86 modular computing platform...

Hong Kong, 17 July 2006
Sun Microsystems continues to push the barriers of server system design by introducing three breakthrough x64 (x86, 64-bit) products: the world's first 16-way x64 server in a single 4U chassis; the world's first hybrid data server; and the world's first no-compromise blade platform. The three new x64 servers, powered by AMD Opteron processors with Direct Connect Architecture, reinforce Sun's x64 systems leadership and further extend the company's reach into the US$25.3 billion addressable market opportunity for volume and midrange servers.

The new Sun Fire X4600 server, Sun Fire X4500 data server and Sun Blade 8000 modular system are designed to handle the complexities of data centre applications, high-performance computing (HPC), virtualization and web-tier applications. In conjunction with the Solaris 10 Operating System (OS), they take 64-bit computing to a place where no company has gone before - offering increased performance, improved energy efficiency, greater manageability and increased data centre longevity over comparable solutions. Similar to the flexibility of Sun's existing x64 servers, these systems also offer customers the option of running standard distributions of Linux and Windows.

"Recent market data shows we're growing faster than the competition – the result of Sun's legendary approach to systems innovation," said Paul Li, Director, Marketing of Sun Microsystems Greater China. "With more than 5 million licenses distributed into the market, Solaris 10 is clearly opening doors to customers who otherwise feel abandoned by their UNIX vendors. With the launch of these groundbreaking new systems, we're pleased to do more than just fill the void – but instead, to redefine choice in the era of industry standards."

Sun is the number one UNIX platform server vendor in the world in both revenue and unit shipments, according to the 1QCY2006 Worldwide Servers Quarterly Statistics Database by Gartner Dataquest released on May 23, 2006. The report also showed that Sun was the only top-five server vendor to have positive revenue growth year-to-year, and the only top-three vendor to have positive revenue growth quarter-to-quarter.

"System designers at Sun are leaders in exploiting the potential of AMD Opteron processor architecture. The combination of HyperTransport Technology and Direct Connect Architecture leads to more efficient and linear symmetrical multiprocessing," said Vanoy Wong, Vice President of AMD Greater China.

"That's why the AMD Opteron is – and will remain – the industry's processor of choice for enterprise x64 systems. Combined with Sun's hardware design and software expertise, the result is innovation in multiple dimensions."

Early access and beta customers have begun to test and implement Sun Fire and Sun Blade systems in their data centres. Tokyo Institute of Technology has installed more than 650 Sun Fire X4600 servers to help build TSUBAME, the 7th fastest supercomputer in the world and the fastest supercomputer in Asia as measured by sustained Linpack performance as of June 2006. Another customer, NewEnergy, has reaped massive savings by consolidating 18 servers, 22 power supplies, 44 hard drives and 26GB of RAM – all consuming more than 14,000 watts of energy – onto a single Sun Fire X4600 server running VMware virtualization software and using just 550 watts of energy.

Sun Fire X4600 server: setting a high bar for the industry to follow
The Sun Fire X4600 server is the industry's only 4-way server that can scale to 16-way in a single 4U chassis. This makes it possible for customers to build their data centre to meet today's needs while gaining the flexibility to support tomorrow's business growth. With powerful performance and high throughput in a small footprint, the Sun Fire X4600 server gives customers the power to consolidate more than 50 x86 servers onto a single Sun Fire X4600 server, all the while offering comparable prices to competitive 4-processor x64 servers from HP and IBM.

Sun's new server, powered by AMD Opteron processors with Direct Connect Architecture, delivers more than twice the performance of Intel Xeon MP-based systems, such as the HP ProLiant DL580G4 server.

The Sun Fire X4600 has already set four world-record performance results on leading industry benchmarks that are reflective of the compute-intensive workloads used in manufacturing, bio-informatics and object oriented databases. Details and additional information on Sun Fire X4600 server benchmarks can be found at: http://www.sun.com/servers/entry/x4600/benchmarks.jsp.

Sun Fire X4500 server: defining the Data Server category
The Sun Fire X4500 server is the world's first hybrid data server combining a 4-way server powered by AMD Opteron processors with the industry's highest throughput rates and storage density at up to five times the density of traditional solutions, at approximately half the cost of alternative solutions. The new system offers up to 24 terabytes (TB) of storage in seven inches of rack space, with costs as low as US$2 per gigabyte, making it ideal for customers that have demanding, high-bandwidth applications such as HPC, data warehousing/business intelligence, digital media streaming, digital surveillance and data analysis.

"Integrating storage and server solutions creates an efficient way of deploying high-bandwidth applications. It shakes up conventional thinking, will delight our customers and puts our competition on notice that Sun is still the innovation leader," said Li.

Sun Blade 8000 modular system: world's first no-compromise blade platform
The Sun Blade 8000 modular system is the only system designed specifically for high-end x86 computing, delivering the performance, price and flexibility of top-of-the-line rackmount servers and the serviceability and efficiency of blade servers. It is an ideal data centre compute engine for server consolidation and virtualization, business applications, large-scale HPC deployments and high-requirement databases in Solaris, Linux or Windows environments.

Blade 8000 modular system can provide up to double the system longevity and double the I/O throughput versus leading blade servers on the market, in 25% less space. Unlike traditional blade solutions, it can also outperform rackmount servers with up to double the I/O throughput, 50% less space and up to 40% lower power requirements.

These benefits can deliver a 49% reduction in ongoing environmental costs at an acquisition price that is up to 60% lower than comparably configured rackmount and blade servers.

Advanced Solaris capabilities
Running the Solaris 10 Operating System on the new Sun Fire and Sun Blade servers gives customers access to many unique and ground-breaking capabilities such as Solaris ZFS and Solaris Predictive Self-Healing for AMD platforms.

Solaris ZFS simplifies data management by eliminating the need for a time consuming and costly volume manager. ZFS supports massive file system sizes 16 billion times larger than 64-bit file systems, and automatically detects and corrects silent or accidental data corruption delivering an estimated 19 "9's" of data integrity.

The latest in Solaris Predictive Self-Healing brings mainframe reliability features to AMD platforms. With Solaris 10, the Sun Fire servers can automatically diagnose, isolate, and recover from many hardware and application faults with virtually no downtime.

System manageability matters
The entire Sun x64 line features an Integrated Lights Out Manager (ILOM) Service Processor that decreases the complexity of managing the data centre by handling all management, monitoring and control functions. ILOM combined with Sun N1 System Manager and Sun N1 Service Provisioning Systems creates a unique management architecture with high levels of automation, which allows IT staff to focus their time on other projects.

For more information on the Sun Fire X4600 server, Sun Fire X4500 data server and the Sun Blade 8000 modular system can be found in the Network Computing online press kit at: http://sun.com/aboutsun/media/presskits/2006-0711/.