Sun releases an entry-level server, plus blades for the telco market

Sun last week rolled out a new entry-level server in its Sun Fire family that uses the company’s eight-core Niagara UltraSparc processor and new blade servers for the telecommunications market.

The Sun Fire T1000, starts at less than one-half the price of the T2000 – $3,000 for a six-processing core, 1.2-GHz processor with 2GB of RAM and an internal hard drive. The T2000 by contrast uses the entire eight cores, and has more memory and internal disk storage. The T1000 can be configured with 4 or 8 cores and should appeal to price and performance sensitive customers.

The company also released tape out results for the next-generation T2 processor, expected to be available in the last part of 2007. The T2 is expected to be twice as fast as the T1 and also be the first 64-thread processor.

The Sun Netra ACTA blade server allows users as much as 30% better density and 10% more performance than Intel blade server products, Sun claims. The new blade servers are the Netra CT900, the CP3010 and the Netra CP3020 blade. The CT900 fits 14 servers into a 12U enclosure. The CP3010 is a dual UltraSPARC IIIi processor-based blade and the CP3020 is a dual core AMD Opteron-based processor blade.

All the blades are based on the open PICMG 3.x and Service Availability forum (SAF) standards. PICMG stands for the PCI Industrial Computer Manufacturers Group, which develops PCI-based specifications for the telecommunications and industrial computing sectors. SAF is a consortium of communications and computing companies that develops and publishes high availability and management software interface specifications.

Sun claims that the new Netra ACTA blade servers will help the company capture more of the blade server market, which IDC says will grow to $10 billion by 2009.

The company also introduced a SAF-compliant Net High Availability Suite (NHAS) and the Netra Blade Management Suite, as well as a redundant Gigabit Ethernet blade.