Community Development Comes to Hardware

We just introduced the first fruits of our collaboration with Fujitsu at a big launch event in New York - and I want to start by offering my congratulations to a unique group of people: those individuals and teams responsible for joint development at Sun, Fujitsu and in the OpenSolaris community. If you believe, as I, that community development is the future of Sun (and our industry), you can point to our announcement as proof - two companies, and a broad open community, worked together to produce a singular product set that presents opportunity for us all.

Together, we're building a line of SPARC/Solaris machines targeting very high scale computing environments. The machines are general purpose, run Solaris without modification, but offer features and scale that were historically the stuff only mainframe customers could love (because no other computers offered them).

The high end of the new family (called M-class, where the M means Mainframe, not Monster, the latter's appealing propensity to eat dinosaurs aside), delivers the industry's most powerful, general purpose computer in a single cabinet, a one teraflop machine (one capable of performing a trillion instructions per second). It looks like the picture at the left (and before you ask, it's targeted at folks who care about the kinds of high performance computational problems that aren't divisible into fleets of smaller machines - although most social networking sites are easily scaled by the addition of more web servers, the same isn't true for large scale airline reservation or ERP systems, or many simulations).

This isn't the only product in the family, there are a variety of other smaller scale systems - which leverage Fujitsu's innovations around mainframe reliability, ours around Solaris and high volume computing, and our joint expertise in building competitive systems and service organizations. And unlike the Rock systems to which I alluded earlier, our M-class systems are shipping today, and designed for conventional workloads.

Below is the note I sent to my counterpart at Fujitsu, expressing how proud we are of the collaboration - and how hopeful we are about continuing that work going forward.

_______________________________________________

Begin forwarded message:

From: Jonathan Schwartz
Date: April 18, 2007 4:18:05 PM PDT
To: kurokawa-san
Cc: citoh, John Fowler
Subject: Congratulations!

Kurokawa-san,

I would like to extend my heartfelt congratulations to you and the entire Sun-Fujitsu SPARC Enterprise product team on the announced shipment of our newest M-class systems. These ground breaking products are a shining example of our collaboration, and the opportunities opened through partnership and cooperation in broadening the SPARC/Solaris ecosystem.

The performance numbers of these new systems are astounding - I understand we can now deliver a full teraflop of computing power in a single cabinet! Additionally, we are achieving spectacular SPARC64 VI performance results - setting world records for SAP performance in enterprise deployments, and Linpack for high performance computing.

These new systems provide breakthrough capabilities for solving massive scale mission critical problems, from financial transaction processing and business intelligence, to simulation, design, and the delivery of enormous volumes of web interactions.

These are truly mainframe systems - that expand the reach of SPARC systems into markets that were previously out of reach. With up to 64 sockets, 2TB of memory, a 368GB/sec backplane, and the addition of instruction retry, memory mirroring and online repair - among many other previously "mainframe only" features - we've unquestionably brought the choice and competitiveness of open systems to an entirely new market segment.

Optimized for Solaris, and entirely binary compatible with existing applications, we're able to offer customers the highest levels of reliability, availability and manageability without high costs, complexity or vendor lock in. By leveraging Sun's expertise in open, partition-based network computing and Fujitsu's experience in mission-critical computing and high performance processor design, we've been able to offer a family of servers that are unrivaled as virtualization/consolidation platforms.

So again, my thanks and congratulations to you and your team - we're honored to work together, and look forward to continuing the development and evolution of the SPARC/Solaris ecosystem.

With warm regards,

Jonathan Schwartz

Chief Executive Officer,
Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Posted on 11:47PM Apr 20, 2007 | Comments[23]

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