Sun signs on more Opteron processors

Sun last week bolstered its line of Opteron-based servers with the introduction of four-processor boxes that are expected to compete with four-way servers from IBM, HP and Dell.

The rack-mounted Sun Fire V40z is available immediately with the Solaris operating environment and Java Enterprise System installed. Sun’s previous Opteron offering was the two-processor Sun Fire V20z introduced earlier this year.

The V40z is targeted at databases, CRM and ERP, as well as electronic design automation. The server, which uses the Opteron 800 Series processors, also runs Red Hat Linux, SuSE Enterprise Linux, Solaris 9 x86 Platform Edition and Software Express for Solaris OS. The server has 1M byte of Level 2 cache memory per processor and as much as 32G bytes of RAM. 

The V40z is available in four models and can be configured with any of three Opteron 800 processors – the 844, 848 or 850. All models have redundant and hot-swappable power and cooling.

The smallest model, the 2 Model 844 starts with 2G bytes of RAM, one 73G-byte Ultra 320 SCSI disk drive and two 10/100/1000M bit/sec Ethernet ports. The midsized 2 Model 848 starts with 4G bytes of RAM and has the same disk space. The large 4 Model 848 starts with 8G bytes of RAM and uses the same processor as the medium configuration. An extra-large configuration server uses the 4 Model 850 processor and starts with 8G bytes of RAM.

All servers have one USB port, one serial port, seven PCI-X slots and can be managed with Sun’s Lights Out Management software.

While Sun claims its V40z will best an Intel Xeon MP on the SPECweb99_SSL benchmark, no results have yet been published on the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (http://www.spec.org) site.

The 2 Model 844 starts at $8,500; the 2 Model 848 starts at $12,500; the 4 Model 848 starts at $23,000; and the 4 Model 850 starts at $28,000. All are available now.

In related news, Sun reduced the price of the two-way 2.2-GHz V20z by a third, to $995.