The Santa Clara, Calif., computing systems vendor said the servers are However, Sun said, the cost of ownership
Sun Microsystems capped the upgrade of its Unix server line for the year,
fitting the Sun Fire E20K and E25K machines with its dual-core UltraSparc
IV+ chips.
The Sun Fire E20K and E25K servers are Sun’s power machines, scaling up to
72 UltraSparc IV+ processors and executing up to 144 computing threads at
once.
primed for running high-volume databases, customer management and decision
support.
Company officials said in a statement the new machines, available now,
contain up to five times greater performance and 20 percent more speed than
previous iterations of the servers.
basically stays the same in terms of the power consumed and the space taken
up.
The E20K and E25K also feature on-the-fly uniboard upgrades, meaning
customers who already own hardware boxes can take out the older UltraSPARC
III or IV motherboards and replace them with UltraSparc IV+ motherboards
without turning off the server.
The idea is that customers can give their data centers a performance boost
merely by “hot-swapping” some chips, or popping out and replacing the
motherboard without any downtime.
The genesis of the UltraSparc IV+ performance boost is that the memory and
data now run closer to the processor than they did in previous UltraSparc
chips.
Sun attributes the new technology to a processor shrink to 90 nanometers,
which allows engineers to add more transistors. This also yields less power
consumption for the same amount of logic.
UltraSparc IV+ has already been provided
as a speed bump for Sun’s entry-level and mid-range Sun Fire V490, V890,
E2900, E4900 and E6900 machines.
Sun likes to position the tandem of UltraSparc IV+ and Solaris 10, with all
of its utility computing and self-management perks, as the go-to combination
for financial institutions or telco providers, which require speedy computer
transactions.
As usual, the server maker is facing stiff competition from rival
IBM, which recently gave its Power chips a speed bump, the Power 5+.
One of these new designs includes a Quad Core module, which allows buyers to
have four Power5+ 1.5 GHz cores in one socket and run up to twice as many
workloads.
Research from firms, such as IDC and Gartner have pegged Sun as the Unix server
leader in units shipped while tabbing IBM as the revenue leader.
What Sun and IBM have in common in dual-core innovations is something
customers have been clamoring for: Faster machines that use less power and
don’t take up additional space, all for the same price as similar Unix
server iterations.