Wednesday December 07, 2005

Doing our bit to save the planet.

I make no apology for writing this item as I am a very proud employee seeing us release some awsome technology yesterday that is clearly light years of what anyone else has - but we won't be resting on our laurels...

The nice thing is this is the second range of machines we have released recently that show our determination to champion Eco responsibility and help the planet when politicians seem reluctant to do so.. We have also setup a new buzzword everyone should care about: SWaP (space, wattage and performance). We developed this to measure the effectiveness and impact of our rack-optimized servers in a typical datacentre environment in response to the potential constraints on deploying more racks of servers caused by power and space shortages. Forty ISV's including Oracle have endorsed this product at launch, the largest number for a new Sun server ever. If that was not enough we have also announced the CoolThreads Competition for Innovation for folks to develop new products to run on this server under Solaris10.

The Niagara chip inside the box which is its multi core processor uses less power than the average light bulb in most houses ! It uses half the power of chips from IBM and Intel. I am interested in what the last computer that used as much electricity as this machine was- I think you will have to go back a long time... Think about that in terms of reducing Co2 emissions. Other startling facts about the T1 processor can be found here . This guy could be said to be the proud father of this multithread technology.

Of course in a product support role we have seen these machines before you all have and tested them and even staged some that have gone to beta customers in EMEA. The other cool thing about this box is that it is being released to customer before the expected date which was next year.

Not forgetting the already announced x64 boxes themselves, they are faster, smaller, cheaper and use less power than offerings from other vendors who I won't embarass by mentioning their names.

To me this new technology from us at Sun goes back to the ground breaking days of the Sparcstation1 ( remember the giant killer box that it was ) and the Sparcstation10/20 with four CPU's in a pizza box to name a few from the hall of fame. One thing is for sure. We are back in the headlines for all the right reasons.