In the wake of reported merger talks with IBM, Sun Microsystems executive vice president John Fowler talked about Big Blue as a rival.
Sun Microsystems executive vice president John Fowler
(Credit: Sun Microsystems)Fowler, in a phone interview Friday, discussed IBM as a competitor in the server computer market and the competitive differences between Intel and Advanced Micro Devices.
"IBM is obviously a classic competition space where we bring to bear all of our technology innovation," Fowler said. "In this particular case, how we've incorporated and done networking technology, how we've incorporated and done flash (memory). The fact that we have an open operating system that runs across our RISC platforms and our x86 platforms and that we have an open storage offering on the 7000," he said.
Fowler continued, "Those are all great discussions to go have with IBM customers. Those are all things that IBM just doesn't have and represent a significant amount of value."
In a question about comparing IBM--which also offers a RISC architecture server platform (PowerPC) as well Intel and AMD--to other competitors like Hewlett-Packard and Dell, Fowler said: "They (IBM) are more similar (to Sun) than the others and interested in more of the same things."
And how does Sun compete with larger rivals? "We have for decades now innovated in a marketplace where companies like HP and IBM have been consistently bigger than us. What we do is incorporate new technologies or invent new technologies more quickly," he said.
Fowler also spoke of some of the differences between Sun offerings on AMD and Intel platforms. He began by saying that a recent Intel Nehalem server chip announcement covers only two-socket (a socket accommodates one processor) servers and that Intel's product is an "entry level" product. "It's a solid product but it really applies to the volume entry-level systems in the world today," he said.
Fowler continued: "Obviously, AMD and (Sun) SPARC cover a much broader range of application scale. In AMD's case, extending up to eight-socket servers and in SPARC's case up to 64-socket servers," he said.
An IBM server vice president discussed IBM's strategy to tap into Sun Microsystems' customer base, in the wake of reports that IBM is in talks to buy the Santa Clara, Calif.-based server supplier.
IBM is rumored to be working toward a merger with Sun mostly due to the strength of Sun's server business. SPARC is Sun's chip architecture, while Solaris is Sun's operating system that runs on both SPARC chips and x86 processors from Intel and Advanced Micro Devices.
"Sun has a terrific installed base," Alex Yost, vice president IBM BladeCenter, said in a phone interview earlier this week in response to a question about Sun as a competitor.
Yost went on to say that IBM has an active business of migrating customers from Sun's SPARC architecture to x86-based servers. "I have a number of clients that are looking to go to Solaris on x86 or Linux on x86," he said. "That's very much something that we're actively doing."
Yost added that there are some IBM customers that require Sun's SPARC architecture. "We also have some clients in very specialized environments that require native Solaris on SPARC," he said. For these clients, IBM has partnered with Themis to offer SPARC blade server on IBM BladeCenter, Yost said.
Part of the challenge of absorbing Sun would be to integrate Sun's products with IBM's. On its Web site, Themis describes its T2BC Blade Server as enabling Solaris applications "to run natively, on an UltraSPARC T2 chip...within an IBM BladeCenter." The Themis product description continues: "The T2 Blade Server can share the same chassis with server blades that utilize other processor architectures and operating systems."
Advanced Micro Devices will announce Wednesday that its first six-core processor in on track to launch later this year.
AMD's "Istanbul" processor will be targeted at server computers. With the release, AMD will be playing catch up to Intel, which began offering its six-core "Dunnington" processor for servers last fall. Intel's first Nehalem-architecture server processor is also due soon, which, on a per-core basis, is expected to offer better performance than Dunnington.
"The silicon is healthy and we're targeting a launch in 2H09," AMD spokesperson Jake Whitman said Tuesday.
"The new 6-core version of the AMD Opteron processor is...everything we had hoped for--and more," John Fruehe, director of business development for server/workstation products at AMD, wrote in a blog.
The "socket 1207" platform and six-core Direct Connect architecture will allow servers with 12, 24 or 48 cores per server in the future, Fruehe said.
"Despite putting more cores in the processor, we managed to keep it in the same power and thermal ranges as our existing 'Shanghai' processors," he writes.
Recent AMD demonstrations of the technology featured "a live, seamless upgrade" of a system based on 45-nanometer quad-core Opteron processors to Istanbul processors. Istanbul is socket- and thermal-compatible with currently shipping AMD Opteron processor-based systems.
Updated on January 26 at 9:50 a.m. PST with additional information about ACP and TDP thermal-envelope ratings.
Advanced Micro Devices on Monday released low-power and high-performance processors that will find their way into servers from Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Sun Microsystems, and Rackable Systems.
The new server processors are updated versions of AMD's 45-nanometer Shanghai processor.
"When we first came to market, we brought out the standard-power (Shanghai processors) because that's where the bulk of our market is," John Fruehe, the director of business development for server and workstation products at AMD, said in an interview. "As always, we follow(ed) up fairly quickly with the HE, which are the energy-efficient models, and the SE, which are the high-performance models."
Pricing for AMD "Shanghai" HE and SE quad-core processors
(Credit: AMD)The five new low-power 45-nanometer quad-core AMD Opteron HE processors operate at 55-watt ACP, or Average CPU Power (PDF). This standard differs from Intel's Thermal Design Power, or TDP, rating.
"TDP is much more conservative," Fruehe said. "The TDP on those (HE) processors is 79 watts," he said. But the "average customer is going to see them running in the mid-40s (ACP) range," Fruehe added.
AMD's HE processor 55-watt ACP is very close to Intel's Xeon quad-core E5430 processor, for example, which has a TDP of 80 watts.
Low-power HE processors, with speeds ranging from 2.1GHz to 2.3GHz, are designed to address a segment of the server market--such as massive data centers--"that must maximize performance during peak hours while managing the energy costs during idle and low-utilization hours," AMD said.
High-performance SE processors, which run at 2.8GHz, are targeted at customers with "the most performance-intensive data center workloads," AMD said.
At the 105-watt ACP thermal envelope, these new processors are immediately available in three new systems from HP, as well as from other technology partners, AMD said.
Sun Microsystems made the Olympic cut. Sun will provide server technology using Intel quad-core processors for NBC's Olympic coverage.
(Credit:
Sun Microsystems)
The technology platform will enable live events to be streamed online to NBCOlympics.com during the Beijing Olympics, which take place from August 8-24, Sun and NBC said Monday.
Intel quad-core Xeon processors will power a total of 160 Sun Fire servers that will drive NBC's Web site, according to an Intel statement. Sun Fire X4150 and X4450 servers will be deployed, according to Sun.
The X4150 servers are offered with quad-core Xeon processors such as the Xeon E5440 (2.83GHz, 80 watts) and the Xeon X5450 (3.0GHz, 80W). The X4450 comes with Xeon 7300 series quad-core processsors such as the Xeon L7345 (1.86GHz, 50W) and Xeon E7340 (2.40GHz, 80W).
In addition to live streaming, the platform will provide video archives of completed events, plus blogs, live chat, and athlete profiles based on approximately 2,200 hours of live streaming Olympic broadband video coverage of 25 different sports on the site.
"Sun has worked hard to architect a powerful, energy-efficient platform for NBCOlympics.com that will rapidly scale for hundreds of millions of sports fans," Peter Ryan, Sun's executive vice president of global sales and services, said in a statement.
Samsung and Sun Microsystems have developed a flash chip for use in solid-state drives that offers higher endurance levels than current devices, the companies say.
The chip is targeted at server applications.
Samsung solid-state drive
(Credit: Samsung)The Samsung flash memory chip is based on single-level-cell (SLC) NAND flash technology and offers a fivefold increase in data write-and-erase cycles over standard SLC flash memory, according to Samsung.
SLC-based flash chips are faster and offer more write-and-erase cycles than multilevel cell (MLC)-based devices. MLC, however, offers greater capacities and lower cost, making it suitable for notebook computers. MLC-based solid-state drives from Samsung, Intel, Micron Technology, and Toshiba are expected to flood the market in the second half of the year.
Samsung's new SLC NAND memory is designed for server-grade SSDs, particularly high-transaction data processing servers. The "ultra-endurance" memory has been developed in close cooperation with Sun over the past several months, Samsung said.
"We have been working with Sun to develop this new...server-grade SLC flash memory, which will give IT managers the best in high-density, high-endurance memory design with markedly less energy consumption than we see today," Jim Elliott, vice president of memory marketing at Samsung Semiconductor, said in a statement.
Probable applications include video streaming and search engine operations. The chip will provide a 100X increase over conventional hard disk drives in the number of data transfers (input/output per second or I/OPS) per watt, offering significant power savings, according to Samsung.
Sun said it plans to incorporate the technology into its line of servers and storage, according to Michael Cornwell, lead technologist for flash memory at Sun.
Sun Microsystems and Fujitsu have announced a quad-core version of the Sparc64 processor and servers to that will use the chip.
Fujitsu--which manufactures and designs the Sparc64 processor--along with Sun unveiled the M4000, M5000, M8000, and M9000 enterprise servers that use the new quad-core Sparc64 VII chip. The two companies claim the processor delivers 80 percent better performance using 44 percent less power than the previous Sparc64 VI processor.
Sun Sparc road map
(Credit: Sun Microsystems)The Sparc64 VII is made on a more advanced 65-nanometer process than the Sparc64 VI chip, which used a 90nm node.
Sun is no stranger to multicore--putting many processing cores on one chip. Its UltraSparc T2 processor can place up to eight cores on a single piece of silicon. This allows the UltraSparc T2 to run up to 64 threads--parts of a program that can execute independently--or eight threads per core. It's a feat processor giant Intel still hasn't accomplished.
Sparc Enterprise servers using the Sparc64 VII processor are targeted at high-availability, mission-critical enterprise applications, including large-scale databases, data warehousing, and enterprise resource planning.
Current Sparc Enterprise servers can be seamlessly upgraded by swapping out older processors with the new Sparc64 VII chips, the two companies said. Sparc VI and Sparc VII chips can also be mixed and matched within a "single domain."
Pricing and availability information is here.
2008 is the year of the solid state drive. That's what Sun Microsystems believes as reliability finally measures up to the rigorous requirements of server storage and the cost per gigabyte plunges.
On Wednesday, Sun announced that it is preparing to introduce solid-state drive (SSD) technology that "will completely change how server and storage infrastructure is designed and deployed in enterprise data centers." Sun said it is already shipping Solaris ZFS software "optimized" for SSDs.
Though Sun is not specifying suppliers, Intel confirms that it has collaborated with Sun on SSD development for servers. Intel is slated to bring out high-capacity SSDs in the second half of the year.
Sun follows storage vendor EMC, which announced integration of solid-state drives into its product portfolio in January.
Solid-state drives give "customers 3x better performance at one-fifth the energy consumption of traditional spinning (hard disk drive) disk offerings," according to a prepared statement by Sun.
Sun StorageTek server array
(Credit: Sun Microsystems)Solid-state drive suppliers Intel and Samsung have both discussed the huge potential for servers. Samsung said previously that companies like Citibank and American Express peg server performance on IOPS, or input/output operations per second. Hard disk drives typically achieve 120 to 150 IOPS, while SSDs are in the neighborhood of 10,000 to 30,000 IOPS, according to Samsung.
Intel also sees SSDs playing a role in the server market as a "performance accelerator." The chipmaker cited a streaming video example where 10 SSDs could essentially handle the same workload as 62 high-performance hard disk drives.
In addition to performance benefits, SSDs "save on energy costs compared to traditional Fibre Channel hard drives (and) decrease server and storage sprawl in already maxed-out data centers," Sun said. "SSDs consume around one-fifth of the power of both memory...and disk drives, have no rotating media and consume very little power when not in use."
Sun sees SSDs as a watershed technology. "Flash SSD is the most exciting innovation to happen to system and storage design in over a decade. By mid-2009, it will be in the majority of servers and deliver more capacity than DRAM and far greater overall system performance and energy efficiency," said John Fowler, executive vice president of the Sun Systems Group.
Intel is targeting SSDs for consumer and server storage
(Credit: Intel)Plunging cost is another factor. "Enterprise-class Fibre Channel hard disk drives have only exhibited a 40 percent year-over-year price decline in the last decade, while the Flash SSD price per gigabyte continues to fall between 50 to 70 percent annually," Sun said.
The Mountain View, Calif., company is expected to deliver Flash-based products to market in the second half of 2008. Sun did not cite price or capacities. Today, typical large-capacity enterprise SSD capacities start at 32GB but can range up to 512GB.
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