What is Sun Microsystems' StarCat system, and what markets is it designed to attack?

Sun Microsystems' quick entry into the high-end server market back in 1997 was the result of a great "buy" of Cray technology rather than a Sun-only "build." Nearly five years on, Sun has redesigned its high-end server entirely, basing it on UltraSPARC III chips, Solaris 8, and enough redundant components for near- continuous operations. Sun aims to prove that StarCat can completely replace IBM-compatible mainframes, which are known for extremely high levels of availability and controllability. The new Sun machine is off to a good start, with strong hardware and software features, up to 18 partitions for workload isolation, and sophisticated resource-management software. But its price range of $1–10 million and its required use of Solaris 8 rather than widely used older versions of Solaris, combined with an environment of economic uncertainty, may limit a quick ramp-up in CY01.

On September 25, Sun announced its new StarCat server, formally called the Sun Fire 15000, or Sun Fire 15K. This follow-on to the popular Enterprise 10000 server (code-named StarFire) will be priced from $1 million to more than $10 million (when fully outfitted with maximum amounts of storage and peripherals), depending on configuration. It can also be clustered with other StarCat systems to create extremely large computing systems.

Highlights of the announcement include the following:

• 72 UltraSPARC III RISC microprocessors, running at 900MHz
• Another configuration, with 106 UltraSPARC III processors running at 900MHz and up to 576GB of memory, to be available
• Solaris 8 server operating system
• Use of “common components,” including CPUs, memory, and I/O that are used in all other Sun Fire server systems (3800, 4800, 4810, and 6800) that were introduced in March 2001 (each Sun Fire “server-blade” building block [also called a Uniboard] contains four UltraSPARC III processors and up to 32GB of memory)
• Flexible provisioning of Sun Fire CPU/memory “Sun Fire server blade” system boards, or Uniboards
• Hot CPU upgrade that allows processors to be added while the system is running
• Support for mixed-speed processors within a domain
• Automated Dynamic Reconfiguration (ADR) of system partitions, supported by Solaris 8, allowing for the addition or repair of processors, memory, and I/O while system is running
• Key software modules include Solaris Resource Manager (SRM), Sun Cluster 3.0, and the Sun Management Center (SMC) console
• Overall system bandwidth of 100GB/sec+ with the Sun Fire Interconnect centerplane
• I/O bandwidth of 21GB/sec
• Fully redundant I/O paths to ensure continued processing
• Eighteen I/O hubs to reduce system bottlenecks
• Packaged professional services for data center best practices

Pricing starts at $1.4 million for a 16-processor system with 16GB of memory and ranges up to $4.4 million for a 72-processor system with 288GB of memory and 3.9TB of storage. A 106-processor system with 500GB of memory and nearly 4TB of storage is priced at $7.1 million.