Tokyo and Santa Clara, Calif., October 13, 2008
Fujitsu Limited (TSE: 6702) and Sun Microsystems, Inc. (NASDAQ: JAVA) today announced the SPARC® Enterprise T5440 server, the first server to deliver the scalability and reliability of traditional midrange systems with the breakthrough performance and radical energy efficiency of the UltraSPARC® T2 Plus architecture.
SPARC Enterprise T5440
While competitive systems from IBM and HP cost as much as 80 percent more or deliver as little as 1/4 the performance, the SPARC Enterprise T5440 server with the Solaris™ 10 Operating System (OS) delivers world-record performance and enables customers to consolidate and virtualize midrange applications, including large-scale OLTP databases, CRM and ERP. In a compact 4U package, the SPARC Enterprise T5440 server increases server utilization while reducing energy consumption and lowering operating costs. Additionally, the SPARC Enterprise T5440 server is the first chip multi-threaded (CMT) server to scale up to four processors.
"The new SPARC Enterprise server delivers the vast scalability of 256 compute threads in just a four-RU chassis," said Masami Yamamoto, corporate senior vice president of Fujitsu. "With the addition of the SPARC Enterprise T5440 server, we will be able to further address the needs of customers who are looking to enhance the performance of their datacenters while gaining the benefits of energy efficiency, consolidation and virtualization."
"Sun is dramatically changing IT economics and delivering enormous value to the midrange market that could not come at a more critical time," said John Fowler, executive vice president, Systems Group, Sun Microsystems. "The SPARC Enterprise T5440 server offers incredible performance on a completely different curve in a footprint that's half the size of the competition. For customers, it all comes down to faster, smaller, greener, better."
Energy Efficiency Engineered from the Ground Up; Open Source, No-cost Virtualization Built In
The SPARC Enterprise T5440 server, with up to 32 cores (256 threads) and 512 GB of memory, is one of the first systems to incorporate unique power management features including the ability to park idle threads. The server also features Intelligent Fan Control (IFC), which adjusts rotational fan speed according to changes in temperature, thereby reducing power consumption. Running fans at lower speeds saves significant amounts of energy, and also reduces noise and vibration, which helps extend component life. An additional design element that maximizes power savings is dividing the chassis and fans into cooling zones which allow a response only from those fans needed to compensate for changes in temperature. The SPARC Enterprise T5440 server also features a redesigned power distribution subsystem with highly efficient digital regulators which reduce wasted energy over previous analog designs.
With built-in, open source, no-cost virtualization via Solaris Containers and Logical Domains (LDoms), the SPARC Enterprise T5440 server is an ideal platform for consolidating hundreds of existing enterprise class workloads onto a single system. Additionally, for existing Solaris customers, the Solaris 8 and 9 Containers capability enables customers to run multiple Solaris 8 or 9 environments on a single SPARC-based system. As a result, customers can quickly and easily move existing physical environments to virtual containers on Solaris 10 and take advantage of the performance, scale and cost savings of new SPARC Enterprise CMT-based servers today. Solaris 10 10/08, to be released later in October, also enables improved virtualization performance and includes an enhanced Solaris ZFS file system which offers increased data integrity and a fully integrated disaster recovery capability to help ensure business continuity.
SPARC Enterprise T5440: IBM and HP Can't Stack Up
The SPARC Enterprise T5440 server packs up to 4 processors into a four-RU enclosure weighing 88 pounds (40kg) and typically consumes just 1,575 watts of power. Based on an industry-standard Java Business benchmark result published on SPARC Enterprise T5440 server, customers can reduce acquisition costs and still get better performance than the new eight processor IBM Power 560 Express system, which takes twice the amount of physical space, weighs twice as much and consumes 26 percent more power[1].
The SPARC Enterprise T5440 server also offers massive I/O performance and expandability with up to 10GB/s of raw I/O bandwidth. With the addition of the optional External I/O Expansion unit, the number of I/O slots available to SPARC Enterprise T5440 server can be expanded to support up to 28 PCI-E slots, yielding 2.5x more slots than the competing quad socket HP rx6600 server. More food for thought on the SPARC Enterprise T5440 versus the competition is available at http://www.fujitsu.com/sparcenterprise/ and http://www.sun.com/proprietary6.
SPARC Enterprise T5440 Delivers World-record Performance on Key Enterprise Benchmarks; Customers and ISVs Applaud SPARC Enterprise T5440 Server
The SPARC Enterprise T5440 proves its mettle with world record performance on seven benchmarks including the best four processor result on two-tier SAP® Sales and Distribution (SD) Standard Application Benchmark [2], Oracle's Siebel CRM Release 8.0 Platform Sizing and Performance Program (PSPP) [3], and single node SPECjAppServer2004 [4]. Full details on the SPARC Enterprise T5440 server's record setting performance are available at:
http://www.fujitsu.com/sparcenterprise/ and http://www.sun.com/coolthreads/benchmarks.
Customers and ISVs are also speaking out on the performance, energy efficiency and value of the SPARC Enterprise T5440 server.
"We ran extensive testing on the SPARC Enterprise T5440 server running Oracle databases and it's been truly amazing," said Xin Wang, director of the BOSS operations department at China Mobile. "We were able to double our performance on the 4RU SPARC Enterprise T5440 server compared to our existing 40RU, 64 CPU system and also cut CPU utilization by over 50 percent. We have never seen so much mid-range computing power in such a small box while also dramatically reducing space and power consumption."
"The new quad-socket Sun SPARC Enterprise T5440 server running the Solaris OS has proven itself to be an outstanding midrange server platform for the most demanding Siebel CRM implementations," said George Jacob, group vice president for CRM Applications at Oracle. "Achieving a world record with 14,000 Siebel CRM benchmark users on the Siebel CRM Platform Sizing and Performance Program benchmark is a clear indicator Siebel CRM customers will benefit from the performance, scalability, energy and space efficiency of this new CMT platform."
Additional customer and ISV comments on the SPARC Enterprise T5440 server is available at http://www.fujitsu.com/sparcenterprise and http://www.sun.com/T5440.
Pricing, Product Availability and Services
The SPARC Enterprise T5440 server is available today directly from Sun and Fujitsu and their authorized resellers starting at $44,995 (U.S. List). Sun and Fujitsu are also offering a number of promotions on the new SPARC Enterprise T5440 server. More information is available at http://www.fujitsu.com and http://www.sun.com/tryandbuy.
Sun and Fujitsu also provide a full suite of services to help customers maximize their infrastructure investments. Services from both companies include consolidation, virtualization, maximizing data center efficiency and migration to Solaris 10. More information is available at http://www.fujitsu.com/ and http://www.sun.com/service.
Download Images
Specifications
[1] SPEC, SPECjbb and SPECjAppServer are registered trademarks of the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation. Sun SPARC Enterprise T5440: (4 chips, 32 cores) 692736 SPECjbb2005 bops, 21648 SPECjbb2005 bops/JVM. The price of Sun SPARC Enterprise T5440 is available at http://shop.sun.com/is-bin/INTERSHOP.enfinity/WFS/Sun_NorthAmerica-Sun_Store_US-Site/en_US/-/USD/ViewStandardCatalog-Browse?CategoryName=SPARC_T5440&CategoryDomainName=Sun_NorthAmerica-Sun_Store_US-SunCatalog. Comparisons are made based on information presented at www.spec.org as of 10/10/08 and data presented here. IBM SPECjbb2005 result is presented here: http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/power/hardware/560/perfdata.html. Comparisons with IBM Power 560 Express system are based on 8 processor configuration using 80% of the maximum reported power consumption. Detailed specifications can be found here: PDFhttp://www-01.ibm.com/common/ssi/rep_ca/5/897/ENUS108-715/ENUS108-715.PDF [204KB]. For pricing information reported on 10/7/08 see footnote (4) here: http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/25359.wss.
[2] Configuration and results of two-tier SAP SD Standard Application Benchmark as of Oct. 13, 2008: The SPARC Enterprise T5440 (4 processors / 32 cores / 256 threads) server running the SAP ERP application Release 6.0 and Oracle ® 10g on the Solaris 10 achieved 7,520 SAP SD Benchmark users, the highest four-processor result (Certification number 2008058). For more details, see http://www.sap.com/benchmark.
[3] Siebel CRM 8.0 Platform Sizing and Performance Program (PSPP) benchmark as of 10/01/08. Sun Microsystems:14,000 users, 1 x Sun SPARC Enterprise T5440 ( 4 x 1.4 GHz, 32 cores, 128GB RAM) Siebel CRM 8.0 SIA [20204] ENU, Sun Java System Web Server 6.1 SP8, Oracle 10g R2 V 10.2.0.3.0,Solaris 10 5/08. Sun SPARC Enterprise T5440 power consumption taken from measurements made during the benchmark run.
[4] Sun SPARC Enterprise T5440 (4 chips, 32 cores, 4RU) 5836.15 SPECjAppServer2004 JOPS@Standard