Sun and Fujitsu add Sparc to their romance

FUJITSU AND SUN Microsystems have announced another SPARC-based entry server to add to their growing family of jointly developed high end systems. The new server is seen as filling a hole in the firms’ combined Sparc T and Sparc64 VII product lines.

The server, dubbed "Ikkaku" will be sold as the Sun SPARC Enterprise M3000. It’s a single-socket box based on Sun and Fujitsu’s love child quad-core SPARC64 VII processor with a 2U rack-mount system, room for two 2.5-inch SAS drives and a DVD drive. It also supports four 146GB SAS drives and runs Sun’s Solaris 10 operating system.

The FujitSun processor apparently has 64 KB of L1 data cache and 64 KB of L1 instruction cache per core. A further 5 MB of L2 cache on chip is shared between the four cores.

The system’s mainboard can support 32 GB of memory and purportedly has four PCI-Express x8 peripheral slots. The "Jupiter" server bus, used in bigger Sparc Enterprise M servers, is also used to link the system’s bits and bobs together.

Sun reckons the M3000 has at least two times the performance of its older UltraSparc-IIIi processor entry servers, and uses only half the energy and space. And with a starting price of $15,000, the price isn’t significantly higher either.

But despite the reasonable price, Sun’s new server, just one of many recent refreshes to the firm’s server lineup, may not be enough to boost the firm out of economic woes. Sun’s sales have slumped lately as its big customers on Wall Street feel the heat of the ever growing financial crisis.

IBM and HP have also been piling on the pressure with the Big Blue’s Power Systems and HP teaming up with Intel, using its Itanium processor for the firm’s Integrity line.

In the beginning of October FujitSun released another dual socket system based on the UltraSPARC T2 Plus processor. The firm also unveiled new blade systems last week based on the UltraSPARC T2 chip and Quad Core AMD processors.

The Enterprise M3000 will officially go on sale 28^th October, and start shipping in early November. µ

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