Sun Microsystems (SUNW) has announced the release of Sun Fire servers powered by new UltraSPARC IV+(R) processors.
These new offerings deliver the industry’s only “on the fly” upgrade path that allows customers to leverage the binary compatibility of the UltraSPARC microprocessor and the Solaris Operating System to quickly and easily take advantage of the latest server technology. Upgrading with Sun servers cost half as much as it does with an IBM system and these new systems offer better price/performance than servers using IBM’s POWER5 processors and AIX operating system.
“This introduction makes it clear that SPARC and Power are going head-to-head, now that IBM and Dell have de-comitted to Itanium and Hewlett Packard has effectively end-of-lifed HP-UX. And of the two, only SPARC benefits from the features and volume of the open source Solaris 10 operating system, which supports industry-standard servers from Sun as well as IBM, HP and Dell,” said Jonathan Schwartz, president of Sun Microsystems.
Available for purchase immediately, the new Sun Fire V490, V890, E2900, E4900 and E6900 servers are powered by 1.5 GHz UltraSPARC IV+ processors and run Solaris 10.
“We’re in a new cycle of innovation for SPARC that delivers incredible performance gains,” said David Yen, executive vice-president, Sun’s Scalable Systems Group. “Scalable high performance processing, combined with the same power consumption, footprint and price as previous generations, make the new Sun Fire servers the ideal platform for server consolidation.”