On its numbers call yesterday, Sun Microsystems Inc claimed it shipped over 100 Starfire servers in its second quarter and is expanding production to 150 a quarter. It’s interesting Sun’s doing so well with the Starfire technology. Silicon Graphics Inc engineers reputedly convinced CEO Ed McCracken to offload Starfire’s Sparc-based system interconnect technology – inherited with its acquisition of Cray Research Inc – to Sun claiming the I/O simply wouldn’t scale. We suppose that’s why SGI has just begun to tout the throughput performance of its ccNUMA Origin server technology over Starfire (CI No 3,326). Meantime, with total server orders up 50% year over year Sun claims Hewlett- Packard Co’s new V2200 commercial server is having no effect on its business. Together with the $2bn storage group, servers now contribute 60% of revenue.
