Alongside mid-life kickers to its commercial server lines, Sun Microsystems Inc will this week introduce its first pass at clustering the systems together as database servers – the SparcCluster 1000 PDB and 2000 PDB Parallel Data Base, running Oracle Parallel Server, today’s Unigram reports. The Sparcserver 1000E and Sparccenter 2000E are 60MHz upgrades to the existing 50MHz SuperSparc models, and include a faster version of the Xerox Corp-developed XDBus packet-switch system bus running at 50MHz against 40MHz, which enables Sun to scale to eight processors on the 1000 and to a 20-way on the 2000, which is claimed to provide a claimed 625Mbps sustained throughput on the 2000. Sun’s also increased Sbus input-output speed on the servers from 20MHz to 25MHz and estimates 1,200 TPC-C on the 1,000 and over 2,000 TPC-C on the 2000. The 1000E has up to 1Mb second level cache per CPU, 12 Sbus slots, 32Mb to 2Gb RAM, up to 360Gb disk. A dual-CPU configuration comes in at 3,999 SPECrate_int92 and 4,584 SPECrate_fp92 and is $54,300 with 64Mb RAM and 2Gb disk. With eight CPUs, 256Mb RAM and 4Gb it does 500 tps, 2,941 Network File System operations per second, 15,414 SPECrate_int92, 17,113 SPECrate_fp92 and costs $176,350. 1000 to 1000E board upgrades are from $24,500. The 2000E, comes with 2Mb second level cache per CPU, up to 40 Sbus slots, 64Mb to 5Gb RAM, up to 1.3Tb disk and does an estimated 1,300 tps and 4,385 Network File System operations per second as a 10-way. The dual-CPU version goes to 4,282 SPECrate_int92 and 4,952 SPECrate_fp92 and costs from $124,800 with 64Mb RAM and 5.8Gb disk. A 20-way would deliver 38,213 SPECrate_int92 and 44,722 SPECrate_fp92 and cost $659,400 with 640Mb RAM and 5.8Gb disk. Of some 1,600 2000s installed the average site has six CPUs, there are a handful with 12 or 16-ways, but linear performance increases tail off after a dozen processors, the company admits – until it got some help from one of its friends, who reportedly pointed the fact out to Sun’s embarrassment, no further performance gains were seen after the sixth processor was added. The average 1000 installation, of which there are claimed to be more than 6,000 now, is a quad-processor. Sun estimates less than 10% of the servers have gone through the Amdahl Corp OEM route. It has around 10 beta sites for the E series; out next month, these will be kitted with the new Solaris 2.4.
