Sun swears Sun Fire is a sure fire winner

Ed Zander, president and COO of Sun, underlined the significance of the release of a high-end server system yesterday, vowing it would thrash rivals' offerings.

The Sun Fire 15k Server is the largest Unix server available in a single cabinet. It has 106 processors, up to four times more memory than similar products on the market at 576 gigabytes, and 18 I/O hubs for networking and storage connectivity.

Zander said: "This is as significant a technological announcement as we've made in 18 years, focusing on server consolidation, rationalisation and scalability without stretching costs.

"It's not just about a box. This will set a whole new status for price performance," he added.

Each cabinet can have half a terabyte in memory, enabling users to experiment with memory-only computing if operating a two cabinet cluster, providing one terabyte in memory.

This is expected to provide engineering and medical projects the scope to tackle complex areas such as human genome and offshore oil exploration.

The new server is aimed at reducing server sprawl and overall running costs for customers.

CPUs within Sun Fire can be exchanged with those in the smallest of Sun's server range and each part of the server can operate independently and intelligently, balancing power demand and locating faults.

Sun has acquired Critical Path's mainframe re-hosting business. The software will be offered along with the Solaris operating environment to reduce companies' costs while migrating to Sun servers.

Organisations will not have to rewrite their mainframe CICS code as the Critical Path mainframe re-hosting middleware enables existing transaction processes and batch applications to operate as usual.