Sun Answers to Cisco

Leading the market convergence of open computing, networking, software and storage systems, Sun Microsystems, Inc. launched new products and technologies in its Open Network Systems strategy that deliver huge gains in application performance, with massive efficiency and scalability, to maximize the economics of computing for data centers and clouds.

Unveiled at its North American Partner Summit in Las Vegas, Sun’s broad roll-out of new offerings spans the data center and includes a new advanced blades architecture, new networking technologies and seven new systems based on the Intel Xeon processor 5500 series. To take advantage of special offers and promotions for Sun’s new blades and x64 servers, including Sun’s Try and Buy program.

“Today’s IT customer is looking for three things – speed, simplicity and savings. With Sun’s Open Network Systems approach, we’re combining our networking advancements, our system expertise, our core IP and our innovative designs to transform commodity components into new platforms with breakthrough application performance, efficiency and scale,” said John Fowler, executive vice president, Systems Group, Sun Microsystems. “Our new x64 systems with integrated networking technologies, advanced thermal management, open software and Open Storage enhancements will give the data center an extreme makeover, boosting efficiency and maximizing IT investment.”

Sun’s approach evolves ‘The Network is the Computer’ as a guiding technology principle and delivers speed, simplicity and savings via integrating Sun technologies, including: Flash-based solid state disks (SSDs) and Open Storage platforms (speed); integrated networking (simplicity); and advanced thermal management and the Solaris(TM) Operating System (OS) (savings).

Sun’s New x64 Systems Deliver Breakthrough Application Performance for Virtualization, Enterprise, Web and HPC Infrastructures
Sun’s new servers deliver maximum performance, efficiency and scale in the data center while supporting multiple operating systems like the Solaris OS, Linux and Windows and a variety of virtualization solutions including Sun xVM Ops Center, VMware, Microsoft Hyper-V, and Solaris Containers, which allows integrated virtualization with low overhead, at no cost. Sun’s new x64 servers and blade systems powered by the Intel Xeon processor 5500 series are:

Virtualization:

• Sun Fire X4270 server – A best value for consolidation and virtualization in a dense 2RU form factor for branch office and departmental settings as well as for horizontally scaled data center consolidation needs.
• Sun Blade X6270 server module – Provides up to 2x more I/O throughput than competing blade servers and provides an all-in-one virtualization solution, including server and network, when combined with the Sun Virtual Network Express Module (NEM).

Enterprise and Web:

• Sun Fire X4170 server – Delivers the performance of a 4U system in a compact 1U form factor with savings of up to 75 percent in rack space, while consuming 60 percent less energy at half the price of competing 4 socket, 4 RU systems.
• Sun Fire X2270 server – Offers 3x the performance at 66 percent the energy consumption of current generation systems. The most compact server in its class, the Sun Fire x2270 server delivers savings of up to 50 percent in data center real estate. Sun Fire X4275 server – An ideal server for the most demanding streaming multimedia applications, delivering 12TB of raw storage at less than $1/GB of storage, with significant space and energy savings.
• Sun Ultra 27 workstation – The only workstation in its class to support the NVIDIA FX5800, the Ultra 27 workstation offers virtually unmatched visualization performance in its class with up to 12GB of main memory and 4GB of graphics memory.

High Performance Computing:
Sun Blade X6275 server module – The first blade server to support onboard quad data rate (QDR) InfiniBand for extreme performance and power efficiency for HPC applications. The Sun Blade X6275 server modules push the limits of performance, providing up to nine TeraFLOPS of peak performance in a fully populated Sun Blade 6048 chassis. Optional Sun Flash Modules provide 24GB of high performance, efficient and reliable storage per node.

Sun is the only vendor to offer SSDs across all platforms and the first and only company to deliver systems with onboard Flash modules. These next generation storage technologies help eliminate I/O bottlenecks and further improve application performance. With SSD integration across software, systems and storage, customers can achieve up to 70x faster response times, up to eight times better throughput, and up to 38 percent less power consumption than servers with traditional spinning hard disk drives. Additionally with connectivity and performance enhancements to Sun Storage J4000 arrays and a processor update in the Sun Fire X4540 storage server, Sun’s Open Storage provides even greater performance with massive storage density at low cost per GB.

Integrated Blades Networking
and Manageability Solution
Sun is the first vendor to deliver low-latency, high performance networking embedded in its new Sun Fire x64 servers and Sun Blades, leveraging integrated networking to help factor out cost and complexity. With Sun NEM technology for Sun Blade Modular Systems and servers, customers can dramatically reduce cost and complexity and simplify large scale blade server deployments into existing network fabrics.

Sun’s integrated networking solutions include:

• Sun Blade 6000 Virtual Network Express Module (NEM) – A high-performance 10 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE), zero management, rapid network virtualization provisioning network module that delivers nearly unprecedented cost per port, 10:1 reduced cabling and takes complexity out of the network infrastructure by eliminating a full switching layer.
• Sun Blade 6048 InfiniBand (IB) Quad Data Rate NEM (QNEM) – Industry leading solution for intense workloads with low latency and high throughput I/O requirements. Designed for the highly scalable Sun Blade 6048 Modular System and can easily scale from a single chassis to compute clusters with more than 5000 nodes.
• Sun Quad Data Rate IB and Host Channel Adaptors (QDR HCA) – Extends QDR functionality to blade and rack server compute nodes to provide the ultimate in price/performance.

Additionally with unified systems management via Sun’s Integrated Lights Out Manager (ILOM), customers can simply and easily manage Sun blades and servers. Sun’s ILOM also integrates simply and easily with leading System Management platforms such as Sun xVM Ops Center and other third party management and monitoring frameworks.

Solaris Optimization Unleashes Intel Xeon Processor 5500 Series’ Enterprise Capabilities; Advanced Thermal Management Helps Increase Energy Efficiency
The Solaris platform, including the Solaris 10 OS and OpenSolaris, has been extended to provide performance, energy efficiency and reliability enhancements for the new Intel Xeon processor 5500 series. Solaris-based systems using the Intel Xeon processor 5500 series can automatically leverage new Intel(R) Quick Path Interconnect, Intel Turbo Boost and Intel(R) Hyper-Threading technologies to further improve performance and scalability.

The new Sun Cooling Door for the Sun Blade 6048 modular system, with a capacity of up to 35kW per rack, provides six times more efficient rack cooling than standard data center cooling systems and increases effective compute density by up to 70 percent over traditional in-row cooling options. The Sun Cooling Door can leverage existing chilled-water infrastructures or eco-friendly refrigerant gas.

Sun Open Network Systems Set More Than A Dozen World Records on Industry Standard Benchmarks
Delivering up to three times the performance of dual-socket systems based on previous generation Intel Xeon processors, Sun’s new x64 servers and blade modules offer a dramatic improvement in processing capabilities on a diverse range of workloads including:

Enterprise and Web:

• TPC-H 1000GB benchmark – The Sun Fire X4275 server set a world record for all non-clustered systems offering 4x more price/performance over the competition. Sun’s solution uses Solaris 10 and Sybase IQ 15 to claim a two processor world record result.
• Two-tier SAP SD Standard Application Benchmark – The Sun Fire X4270 server running SAP ERP application Release 6.0 Enhancement Pack 4 (Unicode) with Oracle) Database on top of Solaris 10 OS delivered the highest two-processor Unicode result on the two-tier SAP SD Standard Application Benchmark, as of March 30, 2009).
• SPECweb2005 benchmark – The Sun Fire X4270 server is the fastest Web server on the market, outperforming a similarly equipped HP DL 380 G6 server with more system memory, on an industry standard benchmark for evaluating Web Server performance, making the 2RU Sun server an ultimate solution for power and space-constrained data centers.
• Thomson Reuters Market Data System Benchmark – The Sun Blade X6270 server module running Reuters Market Data System 6.3.3 (RMDS) on the Solaris 10 OS, posted the best throughput result of 1,540,000 messages per second for Source Distributor and 1,330,000 messages per second for point-to-point-server (P2PS). The new benchmark result demonstrates the robustness of Solaris 10 implementation of the 10Gb Ethernet protocol showing traditional RMDS topology on the Sun Blade X6270 can handle throughput of up to 850,000 messages per second with end-to-end latency of less than one millisecond.

Java:

• SPECjvm2008 benchmark – The Sun Blade X6270 server module leads the pack on this general-purpose multi-threaded Java benchmark. For customer deployments that often employ Java Runtime Environment (JRE) to execute a single application on a given system, the OpenSolaris 2008.11 and Java HotSpot software, offer a proven and stable environment with best performance in the industry.
• SPECjbb2005 benchmark – The Sun Blade X6270 server module, running OpenSolaris 2008.11 and the latest version of Java HotSpot software, has posted the x86 world record for all systems with single Java Virtual Machine (JVM) instance. This record-breaking result represents a real-world server-side Java application deployment scenario and demonstrates the outstanding scalability and optimized performance of Sun’s software offering.

Sun has also set half a dozen world records on HPC benchmarks.

Customers Embrace Sun’s New Open Network Systems
"Sandia National Labs is very excited to be one of the first customers for the new Sun Blade X6275 and Sun Blade 6048 QDR InfiniBand Network Express Module. In addition, we will also be implementing the Lustre parallel file system to meet our stringent I/O bandwidth requirements. We anticipate that the new high performance capacity computing systems we are developing in partnership with Sun — which make use of the new Intel Xeon 5500 series, onboard InfiniBand communication, Sun’s new IB switches and the innovative Sun cooling doors — will provide us a tremendous increase in our space, power and cost efficiency,” said Dr. Robert W. Leland, Director, Computing and Network Services Center, Sandia National Laboratories.

Sun’s x64 systems powered by Intel Xeon processors continue to deliver customer value across a range of industries from telecommunications to media and entertainment services and have been deployed by customers including the Australian Bureau of Meteorology, Australian National University (ANU), South Africa’s Centre for High Performance Computing, the Galileu Project, Last.fm, Sandia National Laboratories, and University of Zurich.

Sun Services Help Customers from the Ground Up
Sun offers an extensive portfolio of services to help maximize the performance of the x64 server line ranging from virtualization and energy reduction consulting to HPC service offerings. With Sun virtualization and consolidation services, customers can reduce power and cooling costs by as much as 60 percent and increase space savings by as much as 57 percent . Customers can also leverage unique pricing models through Sun Blade Modular Systems support services, a chassis-based service pricing where one price covers the cost of all components within the chassis.

Availability and Pricing
The new Sun Fire x64 products start at $1,488 U.S. list price. All prices quoted are in U.S. Dollars. Sun also plans to offer Sun Netra systems with the Intel Xeon processor 5500 series later in 2009.

For more information on promotional offers on Sun’s new x64 servers
To view the launch Webcast live or on-demand.