On the back of impressive third quarter numbers Sun Microsystems Inc has gone on the offensive, unveiling its first 64-bit commercial SMP servers as the Ultra Enterprise line and targeting them clearly at the anticipated crop of commodity Intel SMP servers, plus traditional RISC adversaries HP and IBM. It also won a ringing endorsement from Oracle Corp CEO Larry Ellison – supposedly best friends with DEC on high-end database technology – who described Sun servers as his company’s primary development platform. The Ultra Enterprise Sunfire servers accommodate from six to 30 167MHz UltraSparc I RISC processors across four cabinets; CPU modules, I/O boards, disk storage and power supplies can be hot swapped and are interchangeable between models. A new Gigaplane system bus interconnect is claimed to provide up to 2.5Gb per second sustained I/O throughput on RAM- laden systems compared to DEC’s 1.7Gbps AlphaServer 8400 system bus and HP’s 960Mbps T520 bus. It provides three times more throughput than the XDbus Sun uses in its existing 1000 and 2000 series servers. Gigaplane sits between the CPU/memory boards and SBus I/O boards which support ATM, Fast Ethernet and Fiber Channel but no PCI until 1997. The mainframe-class Ultra Enterprise 6000 can accommodate up to 30 UltraSparcs, 30Gb RAM, up to 16 CPU or I/O board slots, 45 SBus slots and 10Tb disk in a rackmount form. An entry-level uniprocessor costs $213,100 with 64Mb RAM, 12Gb disk, one I/O board and CD-ROM. Sun estimates it’ll perform 17,000 transactions per minute – it’s still shy of SPEC95 numbers on its servers. The rack-mount Ultra Enterprise 5000 data center is designed for large-scale OLTP and can house 14 processors, eight board slots, 21 SBus slots, 14Gb RAM and 6Tb disk. It starts at $95,100 with one CPU, 64Mb RAM, 12Gb disk, one I/O board and CD-ROM. It achieves 11,465.93 tpm-C ($189 per tpm- C) running Sybase SQL Server 11. The deskside departmental Ultra Enterprise 4000 can house 14 CPUs, 14Gb RAM, 4Tb disk, eight board slots and 21 SBus slots. It’s positioned as a database engine and costs from $72,800 with one CPU, 64Mb RAM, 4Gb disk, one I/O board and CD-ROM. The Ultra Enterprise 3000 departmental tower for business and technical applications supports up to six processors, 6Gb RAM, 2Tb disk, four board slots and nine SBus slots. An entry-level uniprocessor with 64Mb RAM, 2Gb disk, one I/O board and CD-ROM costs from $39,100. It’s estimated to perform 6,900 tpm. Each I/O board has two 200Mb per second channels, 100Mbit per second Fast Ethernet, Fast/Wise SCSI, Fibre Channel and three SBus expansion slots. All models will ship this quarter. Sun’s also offering monitor-less versions of its two-way Ultra 2 workstations as Ultra Enterprise 2 from $21,000. The new tower form factor server recently introduced as the 167MHz Netra i 150 is available as the Ultra Enterprise 150 workgroup server. Stripped of its Internet baggage it comes with 512Kb cache, 32Mb RAM, 2Gb disk, 100Base-T, CD-ROM, floppy and Fast/Wide SCSI and 12 disk bays priced at $16,500. It’ll ship in the third quarter. Sun also added Unisys Corp’s Open Storage Module rack-mount disk subsystem as the SparcStorage Array Model 214RSM, plus a 622Mbps SunATM 622 Adapter. For use with the Sunfires there are new releases of Solstice Backup, AutoClient, AdminSuite, Site Manager and Domain Manager systems and network management, plus a SyMon graphical systems monitor co-developed with Network General Corp’s AIM Technology division which is interoperable with AIM’s SharpShooter systems management solution. SyMon will go up on the Ultra 2 and 150 servers, and on the 1000 and 2000 series from November. It’s not clear which version of the Solaris operating system will run on the new servers as some of the benchmarking appears has been done on the as-yet unreleased Solaris 2.5.1 – the announcement of which was pulled earlier this week.
