Sun Puts Sparc T2 Processors into Netra Rack Server

Published: February 14, 2008

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Server maker Sun Microsystems has been a darling of the telecommunications sector since Internet-style technologies were adopted by wholesale--they certainly didn't pay retail--telecom and service provider companies in the 1990s. This is why Sun still gets an appreciable amount of its server sales from its Netra DC-powered, NEBS-certified server lineup.

This week at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, Sun rolled out a new Netra server, the T5220, that makes use of the "Niagara-2" Sparc T2 processor, which the company announced last October. The Sparc T2 chip, you will recall, is an eight-core, 64-thread Sparc design with floating point units on every core and that offers roughly twice the performance of its Sparc T1 predecessor at the same 1.2 GHz or 1.4 GHz clock speeds. (This is the performance boost for applications that like to chew on lots of threads, such as database applications, but obviously monolithic Sparc/Solaris applications will not do as well in the comparisons, and in fact, may not perform any differently from performance on earlier generations of UltraSparc-III and UltraSparc-IV chips, much less on the T1s.)

The Netra T5220 server comes in a 2U rack-mounted chassis and can be equipped with T2 chips running at 1.2 GHz with four, six, or eight cores activated (that works out to 32, 48, or 64 threads). The T2 is only supported in single-socket configurations, and Sun is not expected to offer symmetric multiprocessing configurations of the Niagara family of chips until the "Victoria Falls" Niagara-3 chips start shipping later this year. (That is supposed to happen in the first half of 2008, but we'll see.) The T2 chip has two 10 Gigabit Ethernet adapters built into the chip and has on-chip cryptographic co-processors as well. The Netra T5220 has 16 FB-DIMM memory slots and supports up to 64 GB of main memory using 4 GB DIMMs. The server four external Gigabit Ethernet ports, and has a mix of peripheral slots (one PCI-Express x8 slot, three PCI-Express x4 slots, and two PCI-X slots.) The server also has room for four 2.5-inch small form factor SAS drives, and Sun is only supporting 146 GB disks in the machine to keep it simple. The box has two 650 watt power supplies, and requires Solaris 10 with the 8/07 update or later. The base Netra T5220, which has four cores activated and an unspecified amount of main memory, and probably one disk drive, sells for $14,995.

You can see why Sun is excited, at those prices. And companies pay it, too. "The Netra products have been growing at double digits for the past two years now," explains Mark Butler, product line director of Netra systems at Sun. "And we have had triple-digit growth with our ACTA Netra blade business, too. So we are really happy about this business."

At the Mobile World Congress event this week, Sun is also previewing two carrier-grade Netra rack servers using Intel's four-core processors. One is a 2U, two socket box and the other is a 4U, four-socket box, and Butler was not at liberty to say exactly what processors and configurations would be in these machines. But, given the fact that the "Tigertown" Xeon 8300 is Intel's only processor for four-socket and larger machines aside from the Itanium 9100s, it is safe to be the larger Intel-based Netra is using the Tigerton chips. And as far as the two-socket market is concerned, the latest Intel chips are the "Harpertown" Xeon 5400s, and it is a safe bet that Sun is interested in low-voltage versions of these processors.

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