SAN FRANCISCO, CA -- Sun Microsystems, Inc. has announced a high performance system which will extend Sun's reported “technology leadership” as well as reduce customer total cost of ownership (TCO) and improve return on investment (ROI). Announced at a press conference this morning in San Francisco, the new system called the 12K is targeted at the $ .5 million - $1 million price point. The versatile 12K, which was code-named “StarKitty” is positioned between the Sun Fire 6800 server and the Sun Fire 15K, and is well suited for among other things, customers undertaking server consolidation and mainframe re-hosting. With cross-generational and binary compatibility across the entire SPARC/Solaris OE product line, the Sun Fire 12K scales up to 52 UltraSPARC III 900 MHz processors and offers 288 GB of memory running on the Solaris 8 OE.
The 12K’s Uniboard packaging allows customers to plan and manage entire application deployments rather than focus on one system at a time. This provides maximum system availability, flexibility, and application performance. Sun also offers Dynamic System Domains, which improve return on investment (ROI) across the IT enterprise by enabling flexible resource management. Sun's technology and common system components allow for on-the-fly upgrade capability that enable data centers to scale according to peak demand.
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| Sun’s New 12K Server with Friend |
“We expect this to be effective and be leadership in our traditional verticals. So that being telco, service providers, data warehousing, government, life sciences, universities…we have a broad attack in all markets,” said Clark Masters, Sun’s VP & GM of enterprise system products. “I believe what it gives us is price/performance leadership in the half-million to one million dollar space. It opens new opportunities for Sun where we were less competitive in the existing markets.” “The early systems have been shipped to manufacturing, financial services, and the HPC arena for technical, and scientific engineering applications,” said Shahin Khan, chief competitive officer, Sun Microsystems. “As Clark mentioned, and I mentioned in my presentation, one of the things we’re proud of is that these systems can really handle a lot of different workloads. And by the way two or more simultaneously, so they’re very horizontally adaptable. The verticals, as you know, financial services, telco, government, and education have been our traditional ones and energy and life sciences and healthcare are some of the emerging ones for us that we are very excited about.” Labeled as Sun’s “Regatta killer,” the 12K offers technology that is “years ahead at fractions of the price of IBM's p690.” During the press conference mention was made of HP, which is also traditionally strong in the half million to million dollar space, but it seemed clear that IBM and its offerings were viewed as the primary competition for the 12K. For more information visit www.sun.com
