Sun slashes server prices

Sun reduces prices on Sun Fire V880 and V480 servers

Sun last week cut the price of its Sun Fire V880 and V480 servers while increasing the processor speed of its eight-way V880.

The company reduced the cost of the V880 by 25% and increased its processing speed by 17% over the previous model just two weeks after similarly cutting the price of the 12-processor V1280. Sun also reduced the price of the four-processor V480 by 20%.

The Sun Fire V880 now features the 1.05-GHz UltraSPARC III copper chipset instead of a 900-MHz UltraSPARC III processor.

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Sun last week cut the price of its Sun Fire V880 and V480 servers while increasing the processor speed of its eight-way V880.

The company reduced the cost of the V880 by 25% and increased its processing speed by 17% over the previous model just two weeks after similarly cutting the price of the 12-processor V1280. Sun also reduced the price of the four-processor V480 by 20%.

The Sun Fire V880 now features the 1.05-GHz UltraSPARC III copper chipset instead of a 900-MHz UltraSPARC III processor.

Running a Sybase IQ 12.5 database on Solaris, the V880 beat the performance of HP’s SuperDome server by 50%, according to Sun, on the Transaction Processing Council’s TPC-H@1000 benchmark. The TPC-H@1000 is a data warehousing test of one-terabyte databases.
 
In spite of the price drops, which would seem to signal increased competition from Intel-based servers, IDC says Sun shipped more eight-processor servers and gained more unit and revenue market share than Dell, HP or IBM.
 
The V880 starts at $33,000 for a two-processor system with 4G bytes of memory. The Sun Fire V480 system starts at $20,000 for a two-processor system with 4G bytes of memory. Sun StorEdge 3510 Fibre Channel and 3310 SCSI arrays can be attached to them.

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