Sun slashes server prices

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.