Our Sunfire people tell us that Sun Microsystems Inc will focus on the RAS – reliability, availability and serviceability – features of its forthcoming Ultra Enterprise servers due later this month. The departmental and data center models – the 3000 (six-way), 4000 (14-way), 5000 (14-way) and 6000 (30-way) – are also designed for hot-swapping, although as there is no support for the facility in Solaris 2.5, it is thought likely to be a statement of direction rather than a deliverable. CPU modules will be interchangeable across the entire range, including the low-end Enterprise 1, 2 (two-way) and 150 models. Sun will also highlight its 2.5Gbps Gigaplane bus, plus enhanced Network File System performance and RAID support.
