Sun Microsystems today announced several customers have selected Sun Fire x64 servers to power deployments in a wide range of industries from education to telecommunications to media and entertainment. Sun continues to see strong growth in the x64 market growing factory revenue by over 21.3 percent year over year, in Q4CY08, according to IDC's Worldwide Server Tracker. Sun also outperformed the blades market with year over year growth of more than 60 percent. Sun's new deployments at Blue Sky Studios, Clemson University, Last.fm, Marteleron, Northern Arizona University and Reliant Security, along with three new world record benchmarks announced today, show Sun's x64 systems, based on the Intel Xeon and AMD Opteron processor technology, provide the performance, efficiency and scale to help power and simplify IT infrastructures.

“The solid growth of Sun's x64 server portfolio is proof positive that Sun's built-in virtualization technologies and innovation sets us apart from other vendors in the market,” said Lisa Sieker, vice president, Systems Marketing, Sun Microsystems. “Whether customers are looking to virtualize their IT environments or build the world's largest supercomputers, Sun delivers technical excellence in design, operating systems, networking, storage and virtualization, fully supported by Sun Services.”

From commercial industries with Web and telecommunications requirements to high performance computing (HPC), Sun's flexible, modular x64 system design can maximize data center efficiency and performance while allowing customers to seamlessly address evolving workload requirements. Sun's x64 server family supports the Solaris Operating System, Linux and Windows, as well as multiple virtualization solutions including Sun xVM Server, Sun xVM Ops Center, VMWare, Microsoft Hyper-V, and Solaris Containers, delivering ultimate scalability and consolidation while lowering power and cooling costs. Additionally Sun's servers are supported by a highly skilled force of Sun Services professionals, delivering a suite of service offerings that better maximize server performance and return on investment. Customers can choose from an array of services, including virtualization, HPC, eco/datacenter efficiency, and heterogeneous support, designed to help customers increase utilization, reduce costs, and go-to-market faster.

Customers using Sun's x64 servers and blade systems achieved dramatic business benefits with increased performance, scalability, reliability and reduced power consumption as demonstrated by Clemson University Computational Center for Mobility Systems.

Clemson University, one of top 22 public universities in the country built the Clemson University Computational Center for Mobility Systems (CU-CCMS), a high performance computing research facility. CU-CCMS selected 43 Sun Blade 6000 Modular Systems with a Sun Blade 6000 Chassis and 10 Sun Blade X6250 Server Modules per chassis managed by Sun xVM Ops Center software. The Sun Blade servers were chosen for their efficient design as well as for performance and reliability. “They are compact and provide incredible compute power for their footprint,” said Dr. James Leylek, executive director, Clemson University Computational Center for Mobility Systems. “We had a fixed amount of square footage, yet we wanted a significant increase in compute power. By using Sun Blade 6000 servers, we kept the square footage the same and went from 7 to 35 teraflops.” In partnership with other Sun applications like Solaris 10 OS and Sun Fire servers, like the Sun Fire X4150 -- InfoWorld's 2009 Technology of the Year Award winner in the Best 1U Server category, and chip multi-threading technology, CU-CCMS, delivers more power per user than other larger systems. With their recent ranking as the world's 99^th most powerful HPC system, according to top500.org, CU-CCMS can now expand their HPC resources to a wide range of new customers in aerospace, aviation and energy industries. Check out CU-CCMS' story at: .

World Record Benchmark Results Spotlight Sun x64 Servers Virtualization Capabilities, Performance and Efficiency

Sun set new record breaking results with three industry-standard benchmarks on key enterprise workloads including virtualization, Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence and secure web-serving. The world record VMmark, TPC-H and SPECweb2005 results on Sun's x64 servers based on quad-core AMD Opteron processor technology show Sun's commitment to delivering customers with a wide range of solutions that will increase performance, reduce power consumption, as well as consolidate and virtualize IT environments.

VMmark: The Sun Fire X4600 M2 server, running VMware ESX Server 3.5.0 hypervisor, posted the best VMmark score published to date. The Sun Fire X4600 M2, equipped with eight quad-core AMD Opteron 8384 processors, delivered a world record VMmark score of 29.11@19 tiles, demonstrating its capability as a highly scalable virtualization platform. Capable of supporting 114 virtual machines simultaneously, the Sun Fire X4600 M2 achieves top ranking in the VMware virtualization space. In addition, the Sun Fire X4600 M2 server consumed only 988W on average using half of the system memory and approximately half the physical space compared to HP's DL 785 G5 server.

TPC-H@3000GB: The Sun Fire X4540 server posted the best price/performance result on the TPC-H benchmark at 3000 GB scale factor for all non-clustered systems. The unique design of the Sun Fire X4540 server allows customers to achieve ultimate storage density – up to 48 terabytes – in a single system with a 4RU footprint, offering an unparalleled “Data Warehouse-in-a-Box” solution that consumes under 1000W of power. When combined with Sybase IQ 15 analytics server software, the Sun Fire X4540 running the Solaris 10 Operating System, offers an affordable and easy to manage solution for organizations seeking high performance analytics and reporting platforms, making it ideal for Business Intelligence/Data Warehousing (BIDW) and Decision Support Systems (DSS) processes.

SPECweb2005: The industry's only four-socket 2RU x64 server based on the Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor, the Sun Fire X4440 server delivered the best 16-core result among all platforms, on the SPECweb2005 benchmark, an industry standard benchmark for evaluating Web Server performance. Sun's compact server outperformed the 16-core HP DL 580 G5 server by 20 percent while consuming only 617W of power on average. In comparison, the HP DL 580 G5 server requires twice the physical space and consumes 79 percent more electricity, making the Sun Fire X4440 server an ultimate solution for power and space-constrained data centers.