Sun unveils new line of midrange servers

by Jaikumar Vijayan

March 21, 2001 —

Hoping to cement its new status as the U.S. server market leader, Sun Microsystems Inc. this morning announced a new line of aggressively priced midrange servers that it claimed would deliver significantly better reliability, performance and system management capability than those built by its rivals.

But users may have to wait until the end of the year before some of the most crucial capabilities announced today become widely available, analysts cautioned.

At a crowded event in New York, Sun chairman and CEO Scott McNealy took the wraps off four new Sunfire servers based on the company's 64-bit UltraSPARC-III chip architecture. The servers, which Sun collectively calls its Midframe series, range in size from a two-processor system starting at around $73,000 to a 24-processor server that will cost more than $1 million. Details about the new servers began to emerge two weeks ago.

The servers are the first midrange Unix boxes to support features that were previously available only on mainframes and on Sun's own highest-end system, the UE10000, said Sun Vice President Shahin Khan.

Core among these are technologies such as Sun's Fireplane interconnect for eliminating single points of hardware failure, dynamic partitioning and server resizing, capacity-on-demand, total hardware redundancy, hot CPU and memory upgrades, and online expansion and serviceability, he said.

"These are the kind of products that will light up the next round of server spending," predicted McNealy, who used the occasion to take broad swipes at rivals such as IBM Corp. and Hewlett-Packard Co., both of whom have recently been falling behind Sun's market lead.

Dismissing the rival products as underperformers and ancient, McNealy claimed Sun's new servers would deliver better performance at a fraction of its rivals' costs.

According to Sun, a 24-processor Sunfire server with 192G-bytes of RAM will deliver up to 1950 mainframe MIPS at a cost of about $789 per MIPS. Similar performance on IBM's new Z/900 mainframe would cost about $1,800 per MIPS, the company claimed.

"If everything were shipping right now, Sun would be the first to have many of these features" on midrange Unix servers, said Tony Iams, an analyst at D.H. Brown Associates Inc., in Port Chester, N.Y.

But it will take at least until the end of the year before the new systems fully support features such as dynamic partitioning and hot-swappable capabilities, he said.

Sun has begun shipping the new hardware in volume but will release much of the new functionality only in incremental upgrades during the next few months, Khan said.

That means rivals such as IBM and HP may have a chance to catch up to Sun before the new capabilities have been fully integrated, he said.

IBM is scheduled to announce an enhanced midrange server line later this year, while HP hopes to deliver enhanced partitioning capabilities on its Superdome high-end Unix server sometime in the second half of the year.

Computerworld