* Sun expects new servers to boost sales
Sun this week is touting what it calls a “blockbuster family of industry-standard, x64 enterprise-class systems” that the company expects to boost Sun’s share of the x86 server market.
The company is introducing three new Opteron-based servers that it claims are faster and consume less power than other Opterons on the market today. The Sun Fire X2100, X4100 and X4200 are dual-core servers that were designed by Sun co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim. Bechtolsheim had left Sun to found Kealia, which was developing advanced server technology, and then Sun acquired Kealia last year.
The new servers are the first Opteron-based servers to use a new architecture. In the servers, drives and processors are aligned on one side of the enclosure, power supplies on the other. Air flows in the front of the server over the disk drives and processors and out the back.
Sun claims that as a result of this design that the servers are able to operate at one-third the power and one-and-a-half times the performance of four-way Intel Xeon-based servers from Dell. The company boasts that the servers are available at half the cost of Dell servers.
With the servers Sun hopes to establish some market share for x86 servers.
“Sun seems to be even with relatively plain off-the-shelf systems,” says Gordon Haff, senor analyst for Illuminata. “These are clearly more advanced, more fully featured servers than what they have been selling, so it should improve their position in the market.”
IDC shows Sun holding almost 9% of the x86 market in 2004, behind IBM, Dell and HP.
The servers, which run Windows, Solaris and Linux, include the rack-mounted X2100, a single socket server; the X4100 two-socket four-way server and the X4200 server. Sun will use this design for future eight-way to 16-way dual-core servers.
In addition, the servers have built-in lights-out management capability, which allows IT to remotely administer them, reboot them and load the BIOS.
The fans and power supplies are hot-swappable, allowing IT to replace them as the server is running.
The X2100 starts at $745, followed by the X4100 for $2,200 and the X4200 for $2,600. They come pre-installed with Solaris 10.
