For an exclusive audience of Middle East-based technology journalists, Sun Microsystems, Inc. (NASDAQ: SUNW) today previewed the Sun Fire (TM) T1000 and T2000 servers featuring patented CoolThreads (TM) technology, a revolutionary new technology that packs a rack of servers onto a single chip. Based on the 9.6 GHz UltraSPARC(R) T1 processor, the new server family has achieved six world-record benchmarks and is setting a new industry standard for energy and space efficiency with as little as half the power, cooling and space costs of other microprocessors on the market.
To articulate the benefits of the new Sun Fire T1000 and T2000 servers to the regional business community, Sun has brought in two of its senior technology experts, Carl Ray, Sun’s Field Engagement Manager, Scalable Systems Group, and Mark Harrison, Sun’s Strategic Competitive Analyst, Scalable Systems Group, to discuss the company’s five-year processor strategy to its MENA sales staff and partner community. This week, Sun hosted special training sessions for staff and partners, as well as a technology media roundtable, in conjunction with its channel development provider, Tech Access.
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 best engines on the planet to run current and next-generation Web, application and distributed database systems. Additionally, the multi-threaded capabilities of the Solaris (TM) 10 Operating System (OS) also work optimally with the Java platform to offer binary compatibility, helping customers to immediately run business and mission-critical applications and take advantage of the new Sun Fire systems' breakthrough performance.
"With this new processor architecture, Sun has taken a five-year lead over its competitors and provided an unprecedented performance boost for our regional customers without the corresponding power headache," said Chris Cornelius, managing director of Sun Microsystems MENA. "Space and power consumption are real business challenges for regional organizations, so Sun is addressing those issues with an unbeatable price/performance system in the Sun Fire T1000 and T2000 servers."
The new Sun Fire T1000 and T2000 systems start at less than $4000, priced at or below industry standard servers from IBM, HP or Dell. Shipping with four, six or eight processor cores, each is able to handle four instruction sequences or “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. The Sun Fire T1000 is a 1U, 19-inch deep server designed for Web and network infrastructures. The Sun Fire T2000 is a 2U, 24.2-inch deep server with extensive internal redundancy capabilities to offer maximum uptime for application services and Web-tier consolidation projects.
Accelerator for the Web
Based on customer and partner feedback, Sun MENA is estimating that server deployment in the region may witness up to a 30% increase above current levels within the next year. Rising energy costs and datacenter sprawl, however, have left thousands of customers with overloaded racks of under-utilized, energy-hogging Intel Xeon servers.
“What we’ve witnessed here in MENA is that the willingness of regional firms to invest in new hardware has resulted in a number of inefficient server farms that run too hot and take up too much space,” continued Cornelius. “Given the extreme performance increase and low power consumption of Sun’s 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.”
System Availability and Pricing
The new Sun Fire T2000 server is available immediately and the Sun Fire T1000 will be available in early 2006. For more information related to all of Sun's NC05Q4 announcements, go to Sun's online press kit at http://www.sun.com/aboutsun/media/presskits/networkcomputing05q4/.
About Sun Microsystems, Inc.
A singular vision -- "The Network Is The Computer"[tm] -- guides Sun in the development of technologies that power the world's most important markets. Sun's philosophy of sharing innovation and building communities is at the forefront of the next wave of computing: the Participation Age. Sun can be found in more than 100 countries and on the Web at sun.com.
