Sun Microsystems, Inc. today announced that several customers are seeing major benefits in performance and investment protection with the new UltraSPARC® IV and Solaris™ platform-based Sun Fire™ mid-range and high-end systems. Additionally, Sun has overtaken the competition with new superior benchmark results gained from the tremendous throughput performance of the new systems.
“From long-term high performance computing research projects to mission-critical data centers in enterprise environments, our customers want to know their investments will be protected as well as having enterprise systems that can be maintained and improved without any downtime,” said Clark Masters, executive vice president, Enterprise Systems Products, Sun Microsystems. “These new throughput computing systems add to generations of Sun’s 64-bit, UltraSPARC- and Solaris platform-based machines that plug and play into data center environments and now deliver up to twice the performance.”
The Boeing Company, the world’s leading aerospace company, is the largest manufacturer of satellites, commercial jetliners and military aircraft, with revenues over $50 billion last year. In its high performance and technical computing (HPTC) environment, Boeing has been using equipment from Sun Microsystems to power its secure high-speed information processing systems. Recently the company upgraded to UltraSPARC IV technology from Sun to boost performance.
“Sun is a valued technical partner because they provide innovative solutions while protecting our current investments. We just received the new UltraSPARC IV processors which demonstrate a significant performance boost with no impact to our applications. This is one of the reasons why Sun has been a long-term technical partner,” said Michael Mott, Information Systems Architect, Technical Fellow of The Boeing Company.
Siemens ICM Invests in Sun UltraSPARC Technology
Siemens ICM is one of the world’s leading full-line suppliers in the field of mobile communications. Siemens ICM’s Prepaid and Intelligent Network Solutions play a leading role in communication technology, and Siemens is a market leader in prepaid services worldwide. With Siemens ICM products, telecommunication operators are provided with high-performance and innovative solutions that are easy to implement and to manage. Siemens ICM is currently utilizing Sun’s 4-node cluster environment as part of its new high availability platform TSP7000, which is the foundation for its prepaid Home Location Registry services on an Oracle database. Early tests are showing applications running at least 50 percent faster.
“Using Sun equipment helps us maintain a competitive edge in our business,” said Konrad Wiesneth, vice president, Siemens ICM. “Because Sun provides binary compatibility, we can move our applications from server to server without missing a beat. We feel that all of our investments, including those in software, people and training, will be protected when we upgrade to the next generation of UltraSPARC IV-based products from Sun.”
World Record Throughput Performance
Sun systems continue to set impressive benchmarks for the UltraSPARC IV- based throughput computing systems, demonstrating superiority in performance over the competition. Measuring sustainable memory bandwidth, the Sun Fire™ E25K server recently reached over 68 GB/s memory bandwidth as measured by the STREAM “standard” benchmark.* This result was over twice the performance attained by the IBM p690 which delivered 34 GB/s. This benchmark demonstrates the measure of copy performance which is important to many commercial applications as well as memory-intensive HPTC applications.
In the commercial marketplace, Sun has established the world record 36-processor, two-tier SAP R/3 4.70 Standard Sales and Distribution benchmark. This SAP-SD test, which used the Oracle 9i Database on a Sun Fire E20K system, supported 5,050 users and was more than 25 percent faster than the 1.5 GHz Itanium2-based server which ran version 4.70.
Another commercial world record on the Manugistics NetWORKS Fulfillment v7.1 supply chain management (SCM) application for the retail industry supported 30 million SKUs per hour. The Sun Fire E6900 system was 1.97 times faster than a competitive UNIX system, providing a marked advantage for enterprises managing inventories.
This new family of Sun Fire mid-range to high-end systems were all announced in February. They combine the advances of throughput computing processor technology and SMP architecture, the Solaris 10 Operating System, Sun Java™ Enterprise System and multithreaded application support. These new systems tightly integrate on-chip capabilities with the operating system to enable customers to mix and match UltraSPARC III and UltraSPARC IV processors in their systems, nearly doubling data center performance at a fraction of the cost of competitive systems. The throughput computing server family includes the Sun Fire E2900, E4900, E6900, E20K and E25K servers, all powered by chip multithreading (CMT) technology of the UltraSPARC IV processor.
