Americas

  • United States
by Staff Writers

In brief: Sun introduces new Ultra workstations

News
Feb 06, 20062 mins
Data Center

Sun last week introduced a new family of three Ultra workstations. Two come with Sun’s grid software, and all ship with some of the company’s developer tools and Solaris 10 preloaded. They also support Windows XP and Linux distributions from Red Hat and Novell, according to Sun. The entry-level configuration for the dual-core Ultra 20, priced from $900, includes an AMD Opteron 64-bit Model 144 chip, 512MB of memory and an 80GB hard-disk drive. Priced from $2,300, the single-core or dual-core Ultra 40’s entry-level configuration includes a single AMD Opteron Model 246 64-bit chip, 1GB of memory and an 80GB hard drive. The Ultra 45 is priced from $3,700 and its entry-level configuration includes a Sun UltraSPARC IIIi processor, 1GB of memory and an 80GB hard drive.

Idealstor has announced Ibac 3.0, a removable-disk back-up appliance that can encrypt data via DESX or Triple-DES and perform Quick System Recovery. Customers can boot off the QSR disk in the event of server failure. The disk contains a version of Windows Server 2003 that restarts the system and uses Ibac to restore data. An eight-drive 4TB appliance costs $16,000.

NEC is updating its Intel-based fault-tolerant line of servers with a dual-core, two-way system that can be upgraded and patched while running. In the past, NEC’s fault-tolerant systems had to be powered down for system changes, but the new 320ma includes two integrated, physically separate modules that contain CPU, memory and I/O so that one side of the system can be patched while the other is running. This Active Upgrade technology also is offered by Stratus on its Intel-based boxes. Stratus and NEC are partnering for joint-product development. NEC’s 320ma is available with 3.2- or 3.6-GHz dual-core Xeon processors and offers more memory than its predecessor, the 320lc. The 320ma starts at $30,000.

BlueArc is announcing new network-attached storage arrays, the Titan 2100 and 2200, that feature a global namespace and support for 10Gbps Ethernet links. The new arrays have twice the performance, throughput and scalability of previous BlueArc Titan 1000 arrays. The previous generation is upgradeable to the new models. The new arrays start at $100,000.