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Sun SPARC Enterprise M8000 Server

Features

Features and Benefits

The Sun SPARC Enterprise M8000 server runs Solaris 10 OS to maximize utilization of your assets and optimize for 24x7 mission critical computing. Ideal for large shared memory applications and business process computing such as ERP, BIDW, and OLTP. It also gives you a long, highly scalable SPARC growth path.

Key Benefits

High single-system performance for large workloads
Open systems virtualization and application consolidation
Increased reliability, availability, serviceability
Faster I/O and increased I/O connectivity
Safe application portability—fits into your existing environment
SPARC/Solaris 10 binary compatibility—Solaris Application Guarantee

The Next Evolution of Servers is Here

Sun open systems for mission-critical applications

Compared to any other offering, the Sun SPARC Enterprise servers give you the widest range of scalability and deployment choices with processing power to spare:

Sun SPARC Enterprise M4000/M5000/M8000/M9000 servers - The ultimate virtualization and consolidation systems with mainframe features and mission-critical reliability at open-systems prices
Sun SPARC Enterprise T1000/T2000 servers with CoolThreads technology - Single-socket, 1-2 RU servers for high-performance web and application tier environments, smaller databases and OLTP

Enterprise-Quality Software

Solaris application compatibility guaranteed

The Sun SPARC Enterprise servers run the Solaris 10 Operating System, which provides full compatibility with existing applications running on earlier versions of Solaris OS. It's part of the Solaris Application Guarantee.

SPARC/Solaris multiplies your virtualization power

Using large systems for virtualization projects is critically important to data center customers. Solaris 10 OS users have it easy, once again, especially with these systems. First, the Sun SPARC Enterprise M8000 server gives you up to 16 dynamic domains with assignment flexibility. Then, Solaris 10 OS lets you apply up to thousands of Solaris Containers per system to completely isolate and protect the applications, data, and performance within each container. That's probably more flexibility than you need. But by comparison, large HP and IBM systems require one OS instance for each container. That's probably a lot less flexibility than you need. It's an easy choice.

A complete enterprise software system pre-installed

The Sun SPARC Enterprise M8000 server comes with the full Sun Solaris Enterprise System, which includes licenses to run some of the most popular software components of the Sun Java Enterprise System software. This powerful and complete suite gives you a wide range of choices to consolidate your IT infrastructure on integrated, open, standards-based systems. After all, that's what Sun does best, and it's where the enterprise is headed. The Sun Solaris Enterprise System can get you there faster.

Enterprise-Strength Hardware

Meet the SPARC64 VI processor

The new SPARC64 VI processor consists of two SPARC V9 cores with two vertical threads per core. It's built with an advanced 90nm Cu 10-layer process technology for high speed and density. You can choose to configure the Sun SPARC Enterprise M8000 server with up to 16 processors with 32 cores running 64 threads. And what's more the SPARC64 VI processor is 100% binary compatible with the UltraSPARC processors — so there is no need to recompile.

Vertical Multithreading (VMT) maximizes resources

The SPARC64 VI processor is designed with vertical multithreading (VMT) technology. This is a coarse-grained multithreaded technology that enables the multithreaded control instructions to suspend idle threads so that the active threads can use any unused resources. As an example, when the number of threads is equal to the number of cores, the system performance is equivalent to a CPU without VMT; however, when the number of threads is greater than the number of cores, VMT increases the CPU throughput by as much as 20 percent. L2 cache misses are hidden very effectively using VMT technology.

Built for datacenter reliability, availability, and serviceability

The Sun SPARC Enterprise M4000 – M9000 servers are specifically designed for the RAS demands of top data centers in the largest installations.

End-to-end ECC protection
ECC and extended ECC protection for memory, memory mirroring, and predictive self healing
Guaranteed data path protection
Most latches (ALU and registers) are parity protected
Automatic recovery with instruction retry
Cache dynamic degradation is built in
The number of data checkers has increased from approximately 800 to 2200

The new backplane interface boosts performance

The Sun SPARC Enterprise M8000 and M9000 servers employ a new system interconnect which is a 737 GB/s crossbar switch that interconnects processors and local memory with the I/O subsystem. This interconnect/bus was designed to minimize latency and provide maximum throughput, regardless of whether the workload is compute, I/O, or memory intensive.

Extended System Control Facility (XSCF) improves system availability

The Sun SPARC Enterprise M8000 and M9000 servers are managed with the Extended System Control Facility (XCSF), a redundant pair of service processors that continuously monitor the system hardware configuration and health, domain configuration and status, error monitor, and notification. A noteworthy improvement over previous generation servers is the new capability of being able to isolate problems down to the chip level. XSCF configures the system to not use the broken part of the chip, and while the system remains available, you can schedule maintenance at a regular interval without incurring costly system down time.

Hot-swap PCIe

The I/O system interface features hot-swappable I/O Units (IOUs), each of which provides eight PCIe slots and four 2.5-inch SAS disk drive bays. Fully configured, these servers support up to 16 internal SAS boot disks, 32 internal PCIe slots. With the optional external I/O expansion unit, you can increase the number of supported I/O slots to a maximum of 112 PCIe or PCI-X slots.

Total domain flexibility

The Sun SPARC Enterprise servers give you significant new levels of domain support. For example, the Sun SPARC Enterprise M8000 server can support up to 16 dynamic domains. For increased flexibility, we extended the domain partitioning granularity down to one processor chip, four DIMMs, and two I/O slots. The combination of dynamic domains, coupled with thousands of Solaris Containers per system that the Solaris10 OS provides, makes this server the ultimate consolidation/virtualization machine.

Available as a Sun System Pack

Sun System Pack

The Sun SPARC Enterprise M8000 server is available as a Sun System Pack, which combines the server with the right services as one offering, enabling customers to yield the most value from their IT assets. Sun System Packs offer significant value advantages over traditional warranty plans by delivering higher value services, such as better service coverage, automatic OS updates and training credits, which enable customers to accelerate performance from day one. The predictable, transparent pricing for Sun System Packs is less than purchasing the server and services individually, and in some cases it costs less than the basic warranty.

View all products that are available as a Sun System Pack.