Sun Fire Servers Heat Up Intel-Sun Relationship
Sun on Tuesday unveiled two new Sun Fire servers featuring quad-core Intel Xeon processors, a move it had to do to expand its business in customer data centers, said Mark Teter, CTO of Advanced Systems Group, a Denver, Colo.-based Sun solution provider which has had a lot of success with Sun's AMD Opteron-based servers.
"Big organizations have standardized on Intel," Teter said. "They know how to optimize their applications for Xeon. And they don't want to change to Opteron."
The Sun Fire X4450 is a 2U rackmount server which includes four sockets for the Intel 7300 series quad-core Xeon processors, giving a total of up to 16 processor cores, said Rebecca Tong, product line manager for the vendor. When it starts shipping next month, it will be the first such server in a 2U form factor to come to market, Tong said.
The Sun Fire X4150 packs two sockets for Intel's 5300 series quad-core Xeon processors, which give it up to 8 processor cores in a 1U package, Tang said. It is expected to start shipping this week.
Sun's moves into the Xeon x86-based server market come on the back of a successful run with servers based on the AMD Opteron processor. According to analyst firm Gartner, Sun's x86-based server revenue rose 42.4 percent in the second quarter compared to the same quarter one year ago, considerably higher than the revenue jump during the same period of 10.4 percent for all vendors.
The new servers are not the first Xeon-based models from Sun. The company earlier this year unveiled the Sun Blade 6000 family of server blades under which blades based on the Xeon, the Opteron, and the Sun SPARC processors can be mixed and matched in the same chassis.
The new Xeon-based Sun Fire servers not only save space, they also help cut data center energy use, Tong said. "The 4450 uses the least amount of power in its class," she said. "Compared to the new [Hewlett-Packard] DL580G5, it uses only half the power."
Teter said that Sun has an impressive Xeon-based server offering, one that helps advance Sun's push to cut data center power usage.
"Sun has been leading system vendors in the greening of the data center," Teter said. "We have been talking Watts per performance for a long time. But now it's really happening."
The new servers for the time being come pre-loaded with Sun's Solaris 10 operating system. However, by year-end, Sun expects to offer them pre-loaded with Linux or Windows, the latter under an agreement signed between Sun and Microsoft earlier this month.
The Sun Fire X4150 with a single processor, 2 Gbytes of memory, and a single power supply carries a list price of $2,995. The Sun Fire X4450 with two processors, 4 Gbytes of memory, one power supply, and a DVD-RW drive is expected to list for about $8,895 when it is released next month.