Sun Microsystems, Inc. has announced the availability of the Sun Fire T1000 and T2000 servers featuring patented CoolThreads technology, the industry's first eight core, 32-thread processor. Based on the 9.6 GHz UltraSPARC T1 processor, code named Niagara, the new server family is Sun's latest offering for the competitive datacenter market. According to Sun, the new servers established seven world-record benchmarks and is providing significant levels of energy and space efficiency.

The multi-threaded 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.

"Sun has once again leapfrogged the competition, establishing a five year lead over any other processor architecture in the world," said Jonathan Schwartz, president and COO, Sun Microsystems, Inc. "We're delivering the world's most energy efficient computers and proving we can connect the planet without torching it or killing off economic opportunity."

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 attempting to remove the barriers to adoption and opening the UltraSPARC T1 platform to other applications, systems designers and operating systems.

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 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.

According to an IDC Insight, by 2009, more than 14 million servers will be installed in the U.S., an increase of more than 50 percent above current levels (Source, IDC, "Server Power Consumption Reemerges as a Critical Cost Factor in Datacenters," Doc #33937, August 2005). In addition, rising energy costs and datacenter sprawl have left thousands of customers with overloaded racks of underutilized, energy-hogging 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," said David Yen, executive vice president, Scalable Systems Group, Sun Microsystems, Inc. "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."

"eBay is a very sophisticated technology platform that allows millions of people around the world to perform incredibly complex and dynamic transactions on a real-time basis," said Paul Kilmartin, eBay fellow and director, Availability and Performance Engineering. "We are always looking to make our user experiences better, faster and safer, and we're excited about what the new Sun Fire T2000 systems bring to the table in terms of power efficiency, scalability and performance."

According to Sun, over 100 customers have beta-tested Sun's new systems over the past six months with very positive results in performance and efficiency. The CoolThreads technology could enable Air France, eBay, EDS, Fiducia and other customers to reduce the number of servers in their datacenters by as much as 75 percent.

"We are ecstatic with the cost, throughput performance and power economics of the Sun Fire T2000 servers," said Larry Lozon, vice-president of datacenter services, EDS. "As you can imagine, reducing power consumption in our data centers is crucial. During our initial testing, we experienced a 50 percent decrease in server power consumption. These 32-way server on a chip systems will be a major component within our Infrastructure Transformation offering, providing an ideal landing zone for platform re-hosting and technology refresh of high throughput workloads. This will lay the foundation for a tech refresh strategy focused on improving application performance while reducing space and power consumption. We have been so impressed with all of our findings that we are currently underway with plans of our own to migrate our internal website onto T2000s, which will enable us to be more eco-responsible as well."

The CoolThreads servers set seven world records for performance and price/performance, as demonstrated by a variety of industry standard application benchmarks. Sun also beat Dell and HP systems 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 4.3x higher performance per watt while occupying half the space. In addition, the Sun Fire T2000 delivers more than 3x the performance of the 2-way 3.8GHz Xeon-based IBM eServer xSeries x346 while delivering 4.1X higher performance per watt.
 
Sun Fire T2000 server using BEA Weblogic Server was 1.3X 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 nine 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 2 GHz Xeon-based Dell 6650 server by running on the new Sun Java System Portal Server 7, with 6x 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 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 2x, while consuming half the power. In comparison to the IBM p520 2-way Power 5+ server, the Sun Fire T1000 server delivered 1.5x higher performance in 4x less space and at 3.7x 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 1.6x faster than the 2.8GHz dual-core IBM x346.