Sun Microsystems Inc turned the overhaul of its two-year-old SunFire Ultra Enterprise server line into an love-in with ERP enterprise resource planning partners yesterday. Sun claims 30% of its server revenue is now ERP related and that ERP software companies do large amounts of their business – in Baan Co NV’s case 30% – on Sun servers. The new UE 3500, 4500, 5500 and 6500 hardware supports up to 30 336MHz UltraSparc II chips at the high-end and include a new 84MHz turn on the 1.2Gbps, 250 nanosecond latency Gigaplane backplane bus that will reach up to 100MHz to support next-generation UltraSparc III chips. Sun is still not ready to allow customers to configure their servers in distributed shared memory or ccNUMA configurations. We’re not talking about Serengheti yet, said Sun’s Andrew Ingram, claiming ccNUMA latencies are still too much of a speed bump compared with SMP and that it hasn’t found any ccNUMA system that can out-perform its SMP systems. Sun’s making a big play for high-availability on the new servers with a new cut of the SyMon system monitoring software based on technology from Halcyon Inc, plus dynamic reconfiguration, alternate pathing for online repair and hot- swapping derived from its high-end Cray Starfire boxes and a new SAP agent for its Cluster 2.1 package. It claims these are capabilities that its closest rival Hewlett-Packard Co does not, and cannot offer because HP’s high-end work is derived from its Convex Computer’s non-commercial, technical and scientific systems. Sun also says it will get to 99.999% uptime before HP does. Sun says it will offer 99.995% – or 0.86 hours downtime a year – as soon as it gets an Oracle upgrade for its Cluster 2.1 technology. It’s at 99.95% or 4.3 hours downtime currently. Sun will replace its best-selling UE 3000 eight-way with the similarly configured 3500, except the new box uses FC-AL Fiber Channel to connect its internal disks instead of SCSI. It can accommodate 2Tb disk and starts at $50,000 with two 250MHz CPUs. The 4500 and 5500 are the same 12-way system in different cabinets. The 4500 is compact, the 5500 shares the 30-way 6500’s larger form factor. They support 14Gb, 14Gb and 30Gb RAM and 4Tb, 6Tb and 10Tb disk respectively. Prices go from $85,400 for a two- way 250MHz 4500 to $96,400 and $198,400 for similarly configured 5500 and 6500s. Up to four nodes can be clustered. For ERP Sun will extend its integration and partner services with all of the usual suspects.
