Feature Story

September 25, 2007 -- Just months after forging the Sun-Intel alliance, Sun today rolled out the first in a new family of Intel-powered rackmount servers. Based on the Quad-Core Intel Xeon processor, the new Sun Fire X4450 and Sun Fire X4150 servers are designed to help customers support a growing number of users who demand more services, yet offer industry leading compute density, speed, expandability, and energy efficiency.

"Today's enterprises face the challenge of doing more with less," said Paul Read, Sun's marketing director for Sun's Systems Group. "Our customers need to get more mileage out of their resources and Sun's new Intel-based servers offer them high utilization as well as energy and space efficiency."

These systems offer a universal platform to run a broad range of applications on the Solaris Operating System (OS), Windows, Linux, and VMware. They also incorporate leading design elements that provide extremely high density, performance, expandability, and energy efficiency, as well as the benefits of common manageability and easy serviceability.

A Strong Solution for Virtualization and Consolidation

Many companies are struggling to contain costs and maximize space and they're looking to virtualization and consolidation to provide some relief. Virtualization is built into the Solaris OS via Solaris Containers, which provides limitless software partitioning on one license with thousands of applications on one system. This breakthrough approach allows countless private execution environments to be created within a single instance of the Solaris OS. Each environment has its own identity, separate from the underlying hardware, so it behaves as if it's running on its own system, making consolidation simple, safe, and secure.

When paired with the Solaris OS, the Sun Fire X4450 and Sun Fire X4150 servers offer the benefits of built-in virtualization in the OS, plus Intel's virtualization technology embedded in the processor. This combination is designed to run 24/7 at over 85 percent utilization.

"With this announcement, we're extending the reach of the Solaris OS into the mainstream market and showing customers how the Solaris OS on Xeon-based platforms can offer openness, eco-efficiency, and virtualization," said Lisa Sieker, vice president of marketing for Sun's Systems Group.

System Details

The new Sun Fire X4450 server is the world's smallest and most eco-friendly, enterprise-class 4-socket (16-way) x64 rackmount server with a 2U footprint. It delivers up to twice the compute power and memory capacity as competitive servers, but in half the footprint, enabling companies to save space, lower power consumption, and reduce energy, cooling, and real estate costs. It also offers up to twice the expandability and memory capacity.

The 2-socket (8-way) 1U Sun Fire X4150 server delivers up to twice the memory capacity, internal storage, and networking connectivity when compared to competing systems. With 1TB of storage in just 1RU, the server's high disk density and I/O capacity make it a good choice for database and data warehousing applications.

Both servers exhibit fast performance on a broad range of applications running the Solaris OS, Linux, Windows, and VMware.

Sun System Packs Optimize Performance

Sun System Packs combine Sun's proven technology with award winning support services to deliver improved system availability and operational efficiencies. What's more, the combined system and support pricing is often less than customers would pay if they were purchasing the items separately. The Sun System Pack for the Sun Fire X4450 server offers several options, enabling customers to choose the coverage model that best meets their business needs.

Learn more about the new Sun Fire X4450 and Sun Fire X4150 servers.