Sun Debuts Next Batch of Kit As Solaris 10 Looms Large

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

While "Take Back Wall Street" was the theme of this week's quarterly announcements from Sun Microsystems today, the company is not launching that many server and storage products and it is not launching its long-awaited Solaris 10 operating system. That said, Sun is making some important system announcements, and ones that are important for all of Sun's customers, not just companies in the financial services industry.

First off, Sun is bringing its dual-core "Jaguar" UltraSparc-IV processors to the Sun Fire V-class of midrange servers. Sun is adding the dual-core chips, which are clocked at 1.05 GHz and 1.2 GHz as they are in other Sun Fire boxes, to revamped four-way and eight-way machines that will have their CPU count effectively doubled by adding the Jaguars to them. The exact specs of the new machines were not divulged as we went to press, but it stands to reason that the new Sun Fire V490 and V890 machines will eventually offer double the main memory of the current V480 and V880 boxes they replace (which would mean 64 GB for the V490 and 128 GB for the V890) with the same number of disk slots (two in the 5U frame for the four-way and a dozen in the 16U frame for the eight-way).

Andy Ingram, vice president of marketing for Sun's Scalable Systems Computing group, says that the machines will offer roughly twice the performance of the existing V480 and V880 machines, and says that Sun will charge accordingly. Ingram says that Sun is not announcing a price cut on the existing V480 and V880 systems as it rolls out the new machines, and says further that these boxes will be available for approximately nine months more, when they will be replaced by the new V490 and V880 machines. He said that this is about the same time that Sun is expected to crank up the clock speed on the Jaguar processors, and that Sun would follow up with the "Panther" UltraSparc-IV+ processor, perhaps within nine months after that Jaguar kicker. (It may take perhaps a little more time, he said.) These improvements should tide Sun's customers over until the Advanced Product Line systems it is designing with, and will co-market with, Fujitsu come to market starting in 2006.

A base V490 with two 1.05 GHz Jaguar chips (that's four cores), plus 8 GB of main memory and two 73 GB disk drives will cost $30,995. A V480 with four 1.2 GHz UltraSparc-III processors, 8 GB of main memory, and two 73 GB disks costs $34,995. This V480 probably has about the same performance for 15 percent more cost, so the V490 is a little bit better of a deal. But not much. Similarly, a base V890 server with two 1.2 GHz Jaguar chips (that's four Sparc cores again), plus 8 GB of main memory and six 73 GB disk drives costs $39,995, while a V880 with two 1.2 GHz UltraSparc-III processors, 4 GB of main memory, and six 73 GB disks costs $32,995. Adding another 4 GB of main memory to bring the V880 comparison in synch costs another $6,000, bringing the cost to $38,995. Depending on the workload, this V890 will do about the same work or a little less because of the SMP overhead associated with the dual-core Jaguar chip. So in this case, the V880 currently offers better value at list price. The V480 and V880 have half the maximum potential computing units, and this is a factor in any Sun customer's buying decision.

Sun is not announcing any new Opteron-based servers in this batch of quarterly announcements, but it is bringing out a few more subscription-style pricing alternatives on selected products. Sun is offering an HPC grid utility package that puts together its two-way Sun Fire V20z Opteron-based servers, Grid Engine grid software, and a Linux operating system. Customers with CPU-hungry workloads like electronic design, digital content creation, computer-aided design, petroleum exploration, and life sciences will find such an offering appealing, and it will be priced starting at $.99 per dual CPU node per hour at U.S. list prices. Another offering, called Compute@Sun, will make computing cycles available on Opteron machines running the future Solaris 10 operating system at a rate of $.79 per processor per hour. This is special introductory pricing, Sun warns (which seems to imply that it will go up), but Sun says that the Compute@Sun offering (presumably available on early editions of Solaris 10 running in 32-bit mode, since the 64-bit mode code for Solaris on Opteron is in fact not finished yet) will be available for a limited time to developers for free. (Why Sun is charging 62 percent more for non-gridded Opteron computing cycles than for gridded ones seems a bit of a mystery.)

Sun is also offering utility pricing on its new StorEdge 6920 disk arrays. These are Sun's new midrange arrays, which scale up to 65 TB of total capacity using 2 Gbps Fibre Channel disk drives (36 GB in 15K RPM, 73 GB in 10K and 15K RPM, and 146 GB in 10K RPM are the options). The StorEdge 6920 comes with 4 TB of disk and 2 GB of mirrored data cache, and it can expand up to 16.4 TB in a single cabinet (using 146 GB disks) and up to 65 TB with an additional two expansion cabinets. The system can support up to 28 concurrent hosts and up to 28 GB of data cache. It supports a maximum of 1,024 logical volumes, and can support Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, Windows (2000 and 2003), and Red Hat Linux hosts. The base 4 TB system costs $258,700. In addition to offering the StorEdge 6920 for sale, Sun is also selling it on a utility pricing model based on a new capacity metric called a Sun Power Unit, or SPU. An SPU is not a GB, but rather a complex metric that takes into account the system, software, services and other factors in addition to raw capacity and I/O bandwidth that disk customers are most interested in. Whatever an SPU is (I tried to get a better answer, but didn't get one prior to the announcement), Sun is selling access to capacity on the StorEdge 6920 at a cost of $.80 per SPU.

Finally, Sun is rolling out its rebadged Hitachi "TagmaStore" arrays, which rival Hewlett-Packard just announced a few weeks ago as the StorageWorks XP12000 array. This mammoth array, which will be able to support up to 332 TB using 300 GB disk drives, can deliver 2 million I/Os per second and 68 GBps of cache bandwidth. It also has 192 host Fibre Channel interfaces, making it a serious box for storage consolidation projects. Sun is selling the TagmaStore array as the StorEdge 9990, and says that unlike HP, it is not messing around in the microcode inside the box, which Blaint Fleischer, chief technology officer at Sun's Network Storage unit, says gives it an advantage in keeping in lockstep with Hitachi's technological advances. One of the advantages of the TagmaStore product is that it can wrap itself around existing storage arrays through virtualization ports. Sun adds other software on top of the array, such as its own traffic manager as well as its own SAM-FS and QFS file systems.