News
Sun’s Midrange Gets a Speed Bump
Continuing the battle for the fasted Unix server, SunMicrosystems Inc. said it now offered its 900 MHz UltraSparc III processor inits midrange server line. Previously the fastest processor Sun offered in thisline was 750MHz.
“We think of it as the industry’s best servers gettingbetter,” said Chris Kruell, group marketing manager at Sun. Kruell says Sun continues to upstage IBM Corp.in their fierce competition for the best Unix servers.Kruell admits processor performance is hardly the firstthing most customers consider when purchasing a Unix server – reliability,manageability, and high availability generally come first. However, processorperformance improves overall system performance, and many enterprises take thatinto account.
The 900MHz processor is now available for Sun’s 8-waySun Fire 3800, the 12-way 4800 and 4810, and the 24-way 6800 server. Sundescribes these servers as “mid-frames” because they offer mainframe featuressuch as redundancy and hot-swap-ability at a midrange price point. The serversuse the same chip and memory board as the Sun Fire 15K, which introduced the900MHz UltraSparc III.
Sun also released benchmarks for the Sun Fire 6800. Itwas able to perform 174,658 operations per second on the SPECJbb2000 benchmark.The SPECJbb2000 benchmark models the behavior of J2EE applications, to givecustomers an idea of how a server will perform as an application server. Sunsaid this bests the previous record of 169,794, set by IBM p690 “Regatta”server. – Chris McConnell