Sun Microsystems today announced the availability of the new Sun Fire E20K and E25K servers powered by new world-record performing UltraSPARC IV+ processors. Demonstrating Sun's continued server leadership, these new high- end systems complete the upgrade of the industry's most powerful and comprehensive server line and run the Solaris Operating System (OS), the most advanced operating system on the planet, to create an ideal platform for large scale computing enterprise consolidation. The new Sun Fire E20K and E25K servers are available immediately. Only Sun delivers an operating platform that spans the entire server landscape -- from volume servers up to scalable, high-end systems -- allowing customers to reduce complexity and cost during upgrades. With today's announcement, Sun continues to assert its position as the world's leading UNIX server vendor, offering up to five times greater performance than previous generations at the same power, cooling and space costs -- with no increase in overall system price. In addition, customers can take advantage of these new levels of performance and "on the fly" uniboard upgrades within the same footprint. "We are the first to upgrade high-end servers with next-generation 90 nanometer microprocessor technology, again offering customers true investment protection and the best price/performance in the industry," said David Yen, executive vice-president of Sun Microsystems's Scalable Systems Group. The Sun Fire E20K and E25K servers are Sun's massively scalable, highly available flagship data center servers that scale up to 72 UltraSPARC IV+ processors executing up to 144 simultaneous computing threads. These datacenter systems are optimized for high-volume databases, enterprise resource planning as well as customer management and decision support. Only Sun Offers "On the Fly" Upgrades at One-Half the Cost The new UltraSPARC IV+ processor-based uniboards can be "hot swapped" into existing Sun Fire servers so that customers don't have to replace entire systems in order to experience performance gains. Sun Fire servers powered by UltraSPARC IV+ cost half as much than competitive systems and reclaim price/performance leadership over IBM's POWER-based systems. Only Sun can deliver true investment protection: -- Only Sun gives customers the ability to mix-and-match processor speeds from different generations at native speeds; -- Only Sun provides patented uniboard technology, with up to four processors and 32 gigabytes of memory per board: Customers can simply "hotplug" the new uniboards into existing systems and without having to swap out their entire system; -- Only Sun offers binary compatibility across multiple generations of systems using UltraSPARC processors and the Solaris Operating System. SPARC Continues to Outperform IBM POWER Sun Fire systems that use the new UltraSPARC IV+ processor continue to establish world-records for performance and price/performance, as demonstrated by a wide variety of world-record application benchmarks: -- Sun Fire E20K server achieved a world record on v7.1 Manugistics Fulfillment demonstrated a 74% performance advantage over the IBM p5 590 and v7.2.0.1 Manugistics. -- The Sun Fire E20K with 36 UltraSPARC IV+ 1.5GHz also beat the 32-way IBM p5 590 by 40% on SPECint_rate2000. In addition, the Sun Fire E20K was 43% faster than the Fujitsu PRIMEPOWER1500 32-way SPARC64 V 2.16GHz on SPECint_rate2000. -- Sun Fire E6900 server achieved world-record performance for SPECjbb2005. Sun's 16-way system outperformed the 16-way IBM System p5 570 by 8%. Surprisingly, HP and Fujitsu have not published results on this important new benchmark that demonstrates Java server performance. -- The Sun Fire V490 with Sybase IQ 12.6 achieved the world record on the TPC-H 100GB benchmark. This result beats the POWER5-based IBM eServer 720 in performance and has a 1.9x price/performance advantage. Sun has also provided additional compelling performance comparisons against competitors: -- The Sun Fire 8-way V890 server beats the performance of the 8-way POWER5+ IBM p5 550Q by 29% on SPECjbb2005. -- The Sun Fire 8-way V890 server beats the performance of the 8-way POWER5+ IBM p5 550Q by 8% on IBM's own Lotus Domino R6iNotes benchmark. -- On SPECint_rate2000 the 8-way 1.5 GHz Sun Fire V890 beats the performance of the 8-way POWER5+ IBM p5 550Q by 41% and the Fujitsu PRIMEPOWER900 by 25% on SPECint_rate2000 performance. Also, the 12-way 1.5 GHz Sun Fire E2900 outperforms the 16-way IBM p5 575 POWER5 by 7% on SPECint_rate2000. Customers Sing the Praises of Sun and UltraSPARC IV+ Processors With the largest customer installed base in the industry, Sun's customers speak out on the performance gains and investment protection that the new UltraSPARC IV+ processor offers. Founded in 1805 in Geneva, Pictet & Cie is today one of Switzerland's largest private banks, and one of the premier independent asset management specialists in Europe. Pictet & Cie recently upgraded its Sun Fire E20K server with UltraSPARC IV+ Uniboard processor running Solaris OS, and has seen significant performance improvements over its previous UltraSPARC IV processor based system. Pricing and Availability The new Sun Fire E20K and E25K servers running the USIV+ processors are available immediately. Pricing starts at around $500,000 for the Sun Fire E20K and $1,000,000 for the E25K.