Sun Steps Up With Terascale Computing and On-Demand Capacity

Sun Steps Up With Terascale Computing and On-Demand Capacity

As datacenters move toward virtualization of resources, IT managers must focus on managing complexity, maximizing utilization of resources and efficiently scaling their IT infrastructure, both horizontally and vertically. Sun addresses these issues by designing a Business Ready Infrastructure that combines simplicity, optimal resource utilization and massive scalability.

As part of the ongoing effort to provide the best Business Ready Infrastructure, Sun is announcing two new datacenter offerings:

• Sun Fire Link introduces simplified management and Terascale improved cluster performance across clusters of Sun Fire 6800-15K servers.
• Capacity On Demand (COD) 2.0 provides instant scalability and optimal resource utilization within Sun Fire 3800-15K servers.

These innovations are designed to lower total cost of ownership (TCO) in IT organizations by helping datacenters more efficiently manage the complexity of their infrastructure, optimize the use of their existing resources and seamlessly scale vertically within a single server or horizontally, across multiple servers.

Sun Fire Link

Enabling Terascale Computing with Large SMP Clusters

The Sun Fire Link interconnect allows clustering of up to eight Sun Fire 15K, 12K or 6800 servers for a peak performance that approaches two Teraflops. Sun Fire Link extends the exceptional scaling that High Performance Technical Computing (HPTC) applications have achieved on Sun Fire 6800, 12K and 15K servers across multiple servers. With Sun Fire Link, customers now have an external interconnect that complements the internal power of the Sun Fireplane interconnect. As a result, this beyond-the-box scalability to a large number of processors can mean a faster time-to- solution and the ability to handle larger problems.

Sun also recently announced Sun's new GALAXY program that offers Terascale (trillions of floating-point operations per second)computing capabilities for HPTC customers. Sun now joins the elite group of vendors who can offer this level of large-scale computing capability.

With GALAXY, customers can do more with their current investments. Until now, Terascale computing was confined to custom, single-purpose clusters with low computational efficiency and meager availability levels. Sun's approach is to combine industrial-strength "fat" nodes with the Sun Fire Link's high-bandwidth and low-latency.

For more information, visit the press release:
SUN MICROSYSTEMS UNVEILS SUN FIRE LINK INTERCONNECT TECHNOLOGY; USHERS IN NEW GENERATION OF SUPERCLUSTERS.

Capacity On Demand 2.0

Instant Access to Hardware Resources

As organizations continue to strive to do more with less, IT managers must simultaneously manage costs and meet stringent service level requirements. Capacity On Demand (COD) 2.0 is designed to enhance and simplify system scalability, reduce hardware acquisition costs and increase system availability in Sun Fire 3800-15K servers. By providing instant access to additional system capacity and the ability to activate those resources with virtually no disruption to operations, COD 2.0 allows IT organizations to instantly scale to meet peak demands.

All Sun Fire 3800-15K servers are 'COD ready' and employ common COD Uniboard CPU/Memory boards, resulting in simplified and flexible provisioning of hardware resources. COD 2.0 simplifies on-demand hardware acquisition by employing self-monitoring of system resources; COD customers are not required to install remote system monitoring or generate system usage reports.

COD 2.0 allows organizations to purchase larger system configurations at lower up-front costs by acquiring Right to Use (RTU) licenses only when those resources are needed. This helps better match system usage with asset acquisition. For increased availability, datacenters can have preinstalled "on demand" COD resources that can be activated instantly without having to add hardware options to a production environment. COD provides a cost-effective method for adding reserve or growth capacity, since COD options have lower up-front costs, there is no premium price for COD options over standard options and there is no time requirement to purchase RTU licenses.

For more information, visit the press release:
SUN MICROSYSTEMS DRIVES DOWN COST AND INCREASES FLEXIBILITY IN THE DATA CENTER WITH CAPACITY ON DEMAND 2.0.

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