Sun Fills Server Gap With New Midframe Offering

Sun Microsystems

The Sun Fire 12K, code-named Starkitty, can be configured with up to 52 900MHz UltraSPARC III processors and 288 Gbytes of memory, putting it squarely between the company's 24-way 6800 and the 104-way Sun Fire 15K.

"It's nice we now have something between the 6800 and the 15K," said Ed Gogol, director of enterprise systems at Solarcom, a Norcross, Ga.-based Sun solution provider. "It would have played well in that space for our customers in the last couple of months."

The 15K is still priced high for the midsize business space, especially for clients just implementing an application such as CRM, even if the number of processors is cut, Gogol said. "As you get into CRM, customers initially don't know how far they will scale," he said. "The 15K is just a bit too expensive in the early days for a system expected to expand later. So many people changed their plans to focus on the 6800, or on a couple of clustered 4800 [servers."

Sun is aiming the 12K at the $500,000 to $1 million customer space, one the company admittedly has not addressed in the past, said Steve Campbell, senior director of marketing for the company's enterprise system products. "It's an incremental market for Sun," Campbell said.

id
unit-1659132512259
type
Sponsored post

The main competition for the 12K is IBM's Regatta p690 and Hewlett-Packard's SuperDome servers, Campbell said. It will also compete against IBM's z/800 entry-level mainframe, introduced late last year, he said.

The 12K can be upgraded on the fly to the 15K if needed, Campbell said.

A key feature for the 12K is Sun's Uniboard technology introduced about a year ago for the company's Midframe server line. Each Uniboard holds up to four processors and 32 Gbytes of memory and goes into any of the Midframe servers, allowing multiple server types, including the 12K, to be upgraded using the same Uniboards.

The maximum balanced configuration for the 12K includes nine Uniboards with a total of 36 processors, along with nine I/O slots. For compute-intensive applications, one or more I/O slots can be removed, to be replaced by a CPU card with two processors but no memory, for a maximum of 52 processors and one I/O slot. Such changes can be done without taking the system down, Campbell said.

The 12K is currently available to Sun's direct and indirect channels and may be acquired via distributors such as GE Access and Moca, Campbell said. He expects a high percentage of 12K revenue to come from the channel.

The upgradability of the 12K to a 15K is a good feature, Gogol said. "We specialize in leasing," he said. "So we like to offer upgrades. They're easier to do with a lease."