Sun Revamps its Enterprise Server Lineup

Scott McNealy, the company's CEO and chairman, will use Sun's quarterly Network Computing event to be held in San Francisco on Tuesday to announce the first Sun servers based on the Advanced Micro Devices Inc.'s 64-bit Opteron chip, as well as to debut five enterprise servers running its UltraSPARC IV processors—all of which incorporate its "throughput" technologies.

While the new high-end UltraSPARC IV servers will cost some 30 percent more on average than the UltraSPARC III systems available today, users will see an 80 percent or more performance improvement in these new systems, Mark Tolliver, Sun's chief strategy officer and executive vice president, told eWEEK in an interview ahead of Tuesday's announcement.

Sun was confident that as it showed customers the bump in performance that these new systems brought, they would see it as a good platform to consolidate their existing applications, since the new servers be made to do more, while letting users taking advantage of all the datacenter, mission-critical, enterprise-application features Sun had built in, he said.

"We are also seeing fairly strong demand again for enterprise-level systems as people perceive that the economy might be getting stronger and are looking for additional capacity. This is one of the most dramatic enhancements and upgrades of our server line in years.

"We are excited to release our first UltraSPARC IV servers, which also incorporate our throughput technologies, which we started talking about a year ago. This is absolutely the right product to be introducing at this, the right time," Tolliver said.

Sun's "throughput computing" architecture optimizes the system hardware to handle multiple threads of execution.

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