Sun to Announce New X64 'Galaxy' Servers Today

Published: July 11, 2006

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

The invitations were sent just before the July 4th holiday, after we went on hiatus, and server maker Sun Microsystems is today expected to flesh out its server line at its next Network Computing event, which will be hosted in San Francisco.

While Sun has been mum about exactly what it will announce, the company is expected to finally deliver larger "Galaxy" Opteron-based systems. Sun has sort-of pre-announced its 16-core Opteron boxes by announcing that these machines, which are rumored to be called the Sun Fire X4600s, were at the heart of the 100 teraflops supercomputer it is building for the Tokyo Institute of Technology in conjunction with NEC.

The X4600 is the big brother of the X4100 and X4200, which are 1U and 2U versions of the Galaxy boxes that were announced last fall. The X4600 is reportedly a 4U chassis, which has room for four SAS disk drives and a DVD drive. Unlike the X4200, where these units are mounted horizontally in the 2U chassis, in the 4U X4600 box, the CD is mounted vertically and the disks are stacked vertically, too. This has the effect of pushing the internal storage to the far right of the box, which allows more air flow into the left side of the box, which is where the eight Opteron sockets are humming away. Sun will apparently support single-core Rev E Opteron chips running at 3 GHz and dual-core processors running at 2.6 GHz. The machine will initially support up to 64 GB of main memory, expandable to 128 GB when denser DIMMs become available. Presumably, Sun has Galaxy variants in the works to support the upcoming Rev F "Santa Rosa" Opterons, which are expected in August. The Galaxy machines support Sun's Solaris variant of Unix as well as Red Hat and Novell Linuxes and Microsoft's Windows.

Sun is also expected to deliver its "Thumper" storage array, possibly a blade server, and probably some enhancements to the Sun Fire UltraSparc line. Sun was expected to goose the clock speed on the dual-core UltraSparc-IV+ chips sometime in the middle of the year, possibly pushing up from 1.5 GHz to 1.8 GHz.