Sun Microsystems Inc. (www.sun.com) has released the Sun Fire T1000 and T2000 servers featuring patented CoolThreads technology, the industry's first eight core, 32-thread processor that packs the performance of a rack of servers onto a single chip. Based on the 9.6 GHz UltraSPARC T1 processor, code named Niagara, the new server family has achieved eight world-record benchmarks and is setting a new industry standard for performance, energy and space efficiency with as little as half the power and space of competing systems.

Jonathan Schwartz with CoolThreads UltraSPARC T1.

The massively-threaded new servers allow customers to take advantage of the new CoolThreads technology without having to rewrite applications. The new systems are also the first servers designed from the ground up for Internet workloads and for running current and next-generation web, application and distributed database systems. Sun guarantees binary compatibility on the Solaris Operating System across all supported systems including the new Sun Fire T1000 and T2000 servers with CoolThreads technology. This ensures that software written for the Solaris 10 OS will run unmodified on all supported UltraSPARC systems.

Jonathan Schwartz, president and COO of Sun, said that as the result of more than 10 years of experience with massively multi-threaded systems, Solaris 10 is the ideal OS for systems based on multi-core chips.

In addition, Sun is actively working with the open source community to bring Linux and FreeBSD to the UltraSPARC T1 'Niagara' platform. By open sourcing the UltraSPARC T1 code, Sun is removing the barriers to adoption and opening the innovation of the UltraSPARC T1 platform to other applications, systems designers and operating systems.

The new Sun Fire T1000 and T2000 systems start at $2,995. The Sun Fire T1000 is a 1U, 19-inch deep server designed for web and network infrastructures. The Sun Fire T2000 is a 2U, 24.3-inch deep server with extensive internal redundancy capabilities to offer maximum uptime for application services and web-tier consolidation projects. The Sun Fire T2000 ships six or eight processor cores while the Sun Fire T2000 ships with four, six or eight processor cores. Both ship with up to 32 threads - an industry first - each core is able to handle four "threads." The nucleus of these new systems is the UltraSPARC T1 processor. Its eight cores and massively-threaded design has been developed over the past three years and is significantly more advanced than competing Intel Xeon or IBM POWER processors.

According to the August 2005 IDC Insight, "Server Power Consumption Reemerges as a Critical Cost Factor in Datacenters," by 2009, more than 14 million servers will be installed in the U.S., an increase of more than 50 percent above current levels. In addition, David Yen, executive vice president of Scalable Systems Group at Sun, said rising energy costs and datacenter sprawl have left thousands of customers with overloaded racks of underutilized, energy-hogging Intel Xeon servers.

"The continued build-out of the Internet has resulted in massive, inefficient server farms that run too hot and take up too much space," Yen said. "Given the extreme performance increase and low power consumption of our new Sun Fire servers, any company that has a web, application or database server farm based on Intel Xeon servers needs to test the Sun Fire T1000 or T2000 servers immediately and see the unmatched price/performance and energy savings for themselves."

The CoolThreads servers set eight world records for performance and price/performance, as demonstrated by a variety of industry standard application benchmarks. Sun also powered past Dell and HP on several industry standard benchmarks.

Sun Fire T2000 server using Sun's Web Server 6.1 SP5 achieved a world record SPECweb2005 and demonstrated a 1.7x performance advantage over the 4-way IBM eServer p5 550 with 4.3 times higher performance per watt while occupying half the space. In addition, the Sun Fire T2000 delivers more than 3 times the performance of the 2-way 3.8GHz Xeon-based IBM eServer xSeries x346 while delivering 4.1 times higher performance per watt.

Sun Fire T2000 server using BEA Weblogic Server was 1.3 times faster than the performance of a 4-way 1.6GHz Itanium2-based HP rx4600 server on the dual node SPECjAppServer2004. The Sun Fire T2000 achieved the overall performance world record on all two node results.

Sun Fire T2000 server using Sun Java System Application Server 8.2 Performance Edition (AS 8.2 PE) achieved world record price/performance on the application tier beating a 4-way 1.6GHz Itanium2-based HP rx4600 server on the dual node SPECjAppServer2004. Sun Java System AS 8.2PE is free for development and deployment.

Sun Fire T2000 server, equipped with the UltraSPARC T1 processor achieved overall price/performance leadership on the Lotus R6iNotes Domino 7 benchmark. On IBM's own benchmark the Sun Fire T2000 beats the price/performance of the POWER5+ based IBM p5 p550Q by 27 percent. In addition, Sun has more than twice the price/performance advantage and a 9 percent performance advantage over the POWER5 based IBM p5 570 server.

In a demonstration addressing the portal server workload, the Sun Fire T2000 server beats the performance of the 2GHz Xeon-based Dell 6650 server by running on the new Sun Java System Portal Server 7, with 6 times more logins per second while providing 33 percent capacity headroom on Sun Fire T2000 Server versus zero percent on Dell. This new release of the Sun Java System Portal Server allows users to easily create interactive communities of users and services, building "community" portals populated with collaborative content including RSS feeds, Blogs and Wikis. Additional information on the Sun Java System Portal Server 7 will be communicated in the coming days.

Sun Fire T1000 beats the performance of the Dell SC1425 by over two times, while consuming half the power. In comparison to the IBM p520 2-way Power 5+ server, the Sun Fire T1000 server delivered one and a half times higher performance in 4x less space and at three-point-seven times superior performance per watt.

Sun Fire T2000 server beats the performance of the 1.9GHz POWER5+ based IBM p5 550 4-way on the SPECjbb2005 and was more than 1.6 times faster than the 2.8GHz dual-core IBM x346. HP and Fujitsu have not published results on this new benchmark that demonstrates Java server performance.

On the two-tier SAP Sales and Distribution (SD) Standard Application Benchmark, the Sun Fire T2000 server (1-way, 1 processor, 8 cores, 32 threads) running mySAP ERP Release 2004 posted a score of 950 SAP SD Benchmark users. The Sun Fire T2000 outperformed additional two-tier SAP SD Standard Application Benchmark result posted by the 4-way Xeon-based HP ProLiant DL580 running SAP R/3 Enterprise Release 4.70, which achieved 937 SAP SD Benchmark users and demonstrated performance that was 8 percent faster than the 4-way Itanium2-based HP rx4640 running SAP R/3 Enterprise 4.70, which posted a score of 880 SAP SD Benchmark users.

Sun is now offering a "Try and Buy" program that enables customers and ISV partners to test out a new Sun Fire T1000 or T2000 server running the highly threaded UltraSPARC T1 processor free for 60 days, with the option to purchase the system (sun.com/emrkt/trycoolthreads).

For customers looking to transition away from what Sun spokesmen describe as "power-hungry Intel Xeon platforms," Sun is offering a Web-Tier Consolidation Program (sun.com/webtierconsolidation/) onto Sun's new CoolThreads Sun Fire servers. Sun uses the proven program to work with customers to design a consolidated architecture and drive hard savings in power, cooling and facilities costs.

The new Web-Tier Consolidation Program allows customers to: reduce power and space requirements as much as 95 percent by consolidating web infrastructure to Sun Fire CoolThreads servers; consolidate up to 10 Xeon servers with just one Sun Fire CoolThreads server; deliver more secure and more agile web services; run multiple web applications on one Sun system with Solaris 10 Containers, reducing the complexity of managing hundreds of thousands of applications, multiple servers and multiple operating systems; and take advantage of the most extensive set of built-in security features and the fastest networking stack on any operating system available today for delivering mission-critical web applications.

The new Sun Fire T2000 server is available now. The Sun Fire T1000 can be ordered now for delivery in March 2006. Sun Fire T1000 prices begin at $2,995 and Sun Fire T2000 prices begin at $7,795.