New M-Series Quad Core Systems Debut

Most of what you would want to know about the updated M-Series Sun SPARC Enterprise servers can be found on Sun's web page. While timing of marketing announcements always varies, what I will say is that unlike other vendors who announce products months before they ship, Sun has already shipped a significant quantity of SPARC64 VII quad-core processors and we have received very good feedback from these customers on the performance improvements. As with any processor that doubles the number of cores, your performance may vary. But no matter if you are just purchasing a single M-series CPU board with 4 processors (16 processor cores) to upgrade an existing system or buying a fully loaded with 256 processor cores and 2 TB of memory, the latest SPARC64 VII chip provides real life performance improvements to the M-series platform.

For instance, on the SAP Standard Application Sales and Distribution benchmark which represents tasks performed in real-world ERP environments, the Sun SPARC Enterprise M9000 server with 64 processors 256 cores, and 512 threads, supports 39,100 users, which beats the IBM Power 595 (35,400 SD users) by more than 10 percent, and the HP Integrity SD64B (30,000 SD users) by over 30 percent. But don't expect the new M-series to show up only in back-office ERP environments. For HPC users, the Sun SPARC Enterprise M-Series M9000 also ran 2.023 teraflops on the Linpack HPC benchmark, delivering 2x the performance over SPARC64 VI. Lets just say more than one HPC customer has been looking at the new M-series.

How can you start taking advantage of the performance of a 512 thread SMP server today? Start by downloading OpenSolaris and booting up the live-boot CD image on your laptop. Because one thing is for sure, that other OS you are running definitely doesn't scale to 512 threads and 2 TB of memory. And if the M9000-64 is a little too big for your application, you can start with smaller SPARC64 VII based systems, down to the M4000, a 4-way rack optimized server, now with 16 processor cores and up to 128 GB RAM.

Posted on: Jul 14, 2008

Posted by: marchamilton

Category: General

Tags: none

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Comments:

Any chance of an update on xVM Server? I was looking at VMWare's results today and it seems crazy that they have a valuation double that of Sun when you have better and more open technology. I hope you can get xVM Server to market ASAP and start to take a nice slice of the virtualization marketplace to eat some of VMWare's lunch.

Posted by Kevin Hutchinson on July 22, 2008 at 06:27 PM PDT #

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