Sun Microsystems (www.sun.com) has released Sun Fire servers powered by new UltraSPARC IV+ (USIV+) processors, offering customers up to a fivefold increase in performance over previous UltraSPARC processor generations.

Sun also announced a series of world-record benchmarks for performance and scalability that surpasses competing servers from IBM and Hewlett-Packard.

Sun President Jonathan Schwartz said 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 take advantage of the latest server technology.

Schwartz said 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-committed to Itanium and Hewlett Packard has effectively end-of-lifed HP-UX," Schwartz said. "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."

The new Sun Fire V490, V890, E2900, E4900 and E6900 servers are powered by 1.5 GHz (USIV+) processors and run Solaris 10.

Benchmarks

Sun also announced several benchmarks. The Sun Fire E4900 server achieved world-record performance for SPECjbb2005. IBM, HP, and Fujitsu have not published results on this new benchmark that demonstrates Java server performance.

The Sun Fire E6900 server achieved a world record on Manugistics Fulfilment on Oracle9i Database and Oracle real application clusters, demonstrated a 32 percent performance advantage and a 2.7x price/performance advantage over the IBM p5-590.

The Sun Fire E2900 server achieved an overall world record on IBM's own Lotus Domino R6iNotes benchmark, with 34,000 users, producing the highest number of NotesMark transactions/min (28,268 N-Mark). This result beats the IBM i5-570 in performance by 19 percent at half the price per user.

The Sun Fire V890 server achieved world-record price/performance for servers with more than two sockets on IBM's Lotus Domino R6iNotes benchmark. The Sun Fire V890 delivered 18 percent better dollar per user than the IBM p5-570 and 49 percent better performance.

Sun has also proved additional compelling performance comparisons against competitors. On SPECjbb2000 the 24-way Sun Fire E6900 outperformed 32-way Itanium-based HP servers, a 32-way Fujitsu PRIMEPOWER 1500 and a 16-way IBM p5-570. For scientific computing on the LINPACK "N" benchmark, the Sun Fire E6900 also outperformed a 1.9GHz IBM p5-570 by 22 percent.

The new Sun Fire Servers running the USIV+ processors start at $30,995.