Sun Microsystems Inc is set to take the wraps off its new generation of high-end StarFire enterprise servers this week (CI No 3,072), reports today’s edition of our sister paper Unigram.X. Officially named the Ultra Enterprise 10000 line, the servers originate from Sun’s acquisition of Cray Reseach Inc’s Sparc business last year, and are said to offer twice the performance of Sun’s current high-end Ultra Enterprise systems. They take up to 64 of the new 250MHz UltraSparc II RISC chips, and have been dressed up with mainframe-style storage and high-availability features. But they have approprately high price-tags, with a 16- processor system expected to go from $1m. Enterprise 10000 systems use the Gigaplane XB bus to link the processors; it can drive data at a sustained rate of 10Gbps to memory, 6.4Gbps to disk input-output. Cray’s domain system software supports mainframe-style partitions, good for redundancy among other things.
