Sun enhances SPARC servers

Firms to get better virtualisation and HPC systems, courtesy of Sun's quad-core SPARC64 VII processor

Enterprise hardware vendor Sun has upgraded its M-series server systems, designed in collaboration with IT infrastructure provider Fujitsu, with faster processors and better connectivity options.

Sun said the new quad-core, 2.4GHz SPARC64 VII processor running under its Solaris OS, would deliver, "up to 80 per cent better performance on commercial applications and double the performance on high performance computing (HPC) workloads, whilst using 44 per cent less energy per core."

Four new systems have been introduced, the M4000, M5000, M8000 and M9000. These are aimed at enterprises thinking about deploying systems for virtualisation and consolidation, and also looking to address high performance computing environments.
Announcing this Sun's executive vice president John Fowler said, "We announced the SPARC Enterprise M-series servers a year ago, in collaboration with Fujitsu. These are new versions of the systems using the new SPARC64 VII processor."

Fowler said that users of the earlier server hardware would be able to upgrade with the new version of the processor, but will not need to replace other hardware in the server.

Sun's entry level system, the 6U rack mount SPARC Enterprise M4000 server, can use up to four SPARC64 VII processors, will address up to 128GB of memory and has two gigabit Ethernet ports. The 10U SPARC Enterprise M5000 server uses up to eight processors, can address 256GB of memory and has four gigabit Ethernet connections.

Sun is touting the 16-processor, M8000 model as bringing, "mainframe-class reliability, availability and serviceability (RAS)." As well as being able to address 512GB of memory, double that of the M5000, the processors used by the M8000 also get a speed boost, running at 2.52GHz. The top end system, the mainframe-class M9000, can use 64 processors and can address up to 2Tb of system memory.

Sun's SPARC64 VII processor is manufactured using a 65nm copper 10-layer process technology, and uses Sun's simultaneous multithreading (SMT) technology, enabling, "Multithreaded control instructions to run in parallel across both threads in a core." Sun also said that the SPARC64 VII processor is, "binary compatible with the earlier SPARC64 VI processor - so there is no need to recompile code."