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By Leslie T. O’Neill The new network economy is turning IT into a strategic business arm of nearly every company, but the huge growth in throughput loads has created an unending demand for servers that can scale upwards to meet that demand and still operate efficiently to hold costs to a reasonable level and limit their environmental impact. Today Sun is announcing two new servers that take the proven open-source third generation Chip Multithreading Technology (CMT) to the next level by offering unsurpassed throughput for web scale and enterprise application infrastructures, in an economical and ecologically efficient way - the new servers deliver three times the performance in half the space, four times the performance per watt, and cost about one third as much as competitive systems. "During the last two and a half years the performance of Sun CMT systems has skyrocketed," says John Fowler, executive vice president of the Sun systems group, "and increased more than 5 times from generation to generation, maintaining the same footprint while improving on jaw-dropping power efficiency and price performance. Sun continues to multiply both CoolThreads sockets and threads and today offers performance gains the competition just can't match."
"Sun is blending the performance and scalability of traditional mid-range servers with the proven economies and efficiencies of open-source chip-multithreading technology," says Fowler, "these ground-breaking new servers allow you to scale instantly using less resources, which means you can get new network services to market far more quickly and at significantly reduced cost."
When teamed with the multi-threaded open source Solaris operating system, each UltraSPARC T2 Plus processor can run 64 simultaneous processes, with up to two processors installed into a single space and power efficient system, and appear to Solaris as 128 separate computers. Current software investments are protected because Solaris 8 and 9 applications run unchanged on Solaris 10 on these servers. "Compared to x86 systems, the Sun SPARC Enterprise T5240 server provides up to 5 times the performance in less than half the space with pricing at up to one-third less," says Fowler. These new systems can also have two to four times the memory and local disk capacity, so they can grow as you do, without requiring you to rip and replace. The on-chip encryption and on-board 10 Gigabit Ethernet technology also enables the systems to create outstanding efficiencies for data center virtualization and consolidation with the highest levels of security. Sun SPARC Enterprise T5140 and T5240>Two UltraSPARC T2 Plus processors "The compact form factors and world record throughput of these new Sun servers give administrators a path to compressed data centers, without trade-offs," says Nancy Riley, Senior Product Manager, T5140 and T5240 servers. For example, the T5240 delivers three times the performance in half the space of an IBM p6 570. She adds that Sun’s virtualization software adds to the performance potential of these new servers. Open source LDoms virtualization software is shipped with the new servers at no cost, and can create up to 128 isolated operating system instances, enabling them to consolidate IT jobs on fewer systems. Also available for download are Cool Tools for use in development, tuning, debugging, applications, and deployment utilities that can optimize applications running on CoolThreads servers. Sun also delivers complete services packages, including specialized installation, virtualization/consolidation services, Solaris 10 upgrade assistance, and Sun Spectrum support which provides coverage for the hardware and operating system. Customers may also purchase a Solaris 10 subscription, which entitles them to the latest Solaris Updates, Solaris Named Releases, Software Updates, and other Sun support.
Leslie T. O’Neill writes about Sun technology and was the Test Center Managing Editor and Special Projects Editor at InfoWorld magazine. |
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