Accompanying the MicroSparc-based machines on their maiden voyage will be the great Sun Dragon, now renamed the Sparc Center 2000, the biggest machine Sun has ever tried to field and a clear signal that the Mountain View company intends to muscle its way into distributed data centres of Fortune 1,000 companies. The designation 2000 is intended to establish the Dragon as the system for database and corporate applications for the next 10 years, a clear bid by Sun to take its place in the commercial sector and attract the downsizing crowd. Sun expects Dragon to plough through the logjam holding back diffident customers from committing to Unix because they reckon that pricey Unix servers can’t handle the load. Specified to grow into a 20-way symmetric multiprocessor, Dragon will initially appear only in configurations of two, four, six and eight SuperSparc CPUs – the Solaris operating system needs further tuning to handle a full-blown 20-way, 2,190 MIPS Dragon – with volume deliveries beginning in April. A hundred gamma Dragons are to go to out key customers and independent software vendors in the first quarter.
Relatively unconcerned Sun is relatively unconcerned about the non-appearance of the big Dragon. It estimates that 90% of its users are looking for eight CPUs and 1Gb memory anyway. Dragon’s internal memory will range from 64Mb to 5Gb. Sun will claim that it’s the first machine capable of running an entire database out of main memory. Disk space will start at 4.2Gb, progressing to 500Gb and then to a full 1Tb next year. An entry-level two-CPU machine with 1Mb external cache for each CPU will be priced at $95,000. Additional internal memory will cost a mere $67 a Megabyte – eat your heart out, IBM. Sun will apply the little-used SpecRate performance measure to Dragon: SpecRate is designed to determine how many concurrent jobs a machine can process. An eight-way 500 transactions per second Dragon is said to have a SpecRate int92 of 8,047 and SpecRate fp92 of 10,600. Dragon’s handlers will claim that it’s the new world champion at this kind of thing, besting previous title holders Siemens Nixdorf Informationssysteme AG and Hewlett-Packard Co. While not a fault-tolerant machine or likely ever to be one, Dragon has automatic system recovery for fault resilience. In addition, Sun struck up a development relationship with Xerox Corp’s Palo Alto Research Center to produce a brand new high-speed packet-switching Xdbus for Dragon running at 640M-bytes per second peak, 500Mbps sustained. Faced with a longer sales cycle for the Dragon, Sun expects to sell thousands of them in competition with Pyramid Technology Corp, Sequent Computer Systems Inc and Hewlett-Packard.
