Sun targets Dell with Sun Fire servers

Sun originally considered making last week’s announcement of Sun Fire servers at Costco to emphasize their low cost. The Sun Fire V60x and V65x servers rival Dell for features and price.

The servers run the Solaris x86 operating system or Linux and are based on one or two Intel Pentium Xeon processors. Rack-mountable, they are intended for use as workgroup, application, database and security servers in the Internet infrastructure.

The Sun Fire V60x is a 1U server aimed at Web serving, compute farms and electronic design automation applications. It operates at 2.8 GHz, uses an Intel Xeon CPU with a 533-MHz front-side bus and supports up to three Ultra320 SCSI drives. It has two Gigabit Ethernet ports for connection to a network.

The Sun Fire V65x is a 2U dual-processor server that operates at 2.8 GHz or 3.06 GHz. It also has a 533-MHz front-side bus and as much as 12G bytes of RAM and six PCI-X slots. Optionally, customers can purchase redundant dual power supplies, a RAID controller and failover booting capability.

Both systems can attach to the Sun StorEdge 3310 SCSI storage array and operate in clustered networks with as many as 32 nodes.

Further, Oracle and Sun have joined together to offer Oracle software on all Sun systems. Oracle will offer a version of its Real Application Cluster (RAC) running on Sun’s x86-based products. The two companies will also integrate Sun’s StarOffice desktop productivity package with Oracle Collaboration suite.

Sun also announced an agreement with Red Hat to further the reach of their respective products. Red Hat will distribute Sun’s Java Virtual Machine with its Linux distribution, and Sun will support all x86 versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.