Marc Hamilton's Weblog

What Is Our Most Popular Product This Month?

Let me give you some clues. Earlier this week Sun announced a number of new servers supporting AMD's latest quad core "Barcelona" processors like the Sun Fire x4140, with eight cores, 16 DIMM slots, and 8 internal drives with over 1 TB of storage capacity in a compact 1RU form factor and its big brother, the x4440, the first and only 4 socket AMD quad core server in a 2 RU chassis. Need more than 16 threads, then maybe the Sun Fire T5140, packing two eight core UltraSPARC T2 Plus CPUs with 128 threads in 1 RU is what you need. These are all tremendously powerful servers and have seen great customer adoption in the short time since their release. Of course Sun's education customers in the US are snapping up the eight core Sun Fire x2200 m2 which thanks to the US Education Essentials Matching Grant is discounted from the regular list price of $2815 to $1126. We remember we didn't have much money when we went to school either and don't think student's tuition should go to buying high over priced or out of date servers. But the product line that is getting some of the biggest increases, percentage wise, in customer interest is our most powerful server, the M9000.

Sybase certainly thought so, they recently set a Guinness World Record for the world's largest database, over 1 PetaByte of data and over six trillion rows of transaction data. Now that is a big database. What server did they choose to set this world record with? Sun's M9000. OK, so most users of Sun's MySQL database may be more interested in a x4440 and a Guinness beer, I'm not sure there are any 1 PetaByte MySQL databases yet. But I wouldn't bet against MySQL moving into this range in the future. Meanwhile, lots of customers who need to run really large databases and other open systems applications are turning to the capabilities of Sun's M9000.

Congratulations to Sybase on their new world record! Now I think I'll grab my Guinness, the liquid one not the hardback.

Posted at 08:32PM May 16, 2008 by marchamilton in General  |