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PLX's PCIe Switches Used on
Sun's SPARC Motherboards
SUNNYVALE, Calif -
May 5, 2008 - PLX Technology, Inc. today announced that multiple PLX
PEX 8548 PCIe switches for high-performance PCIe fanout and slot expansion have
been designed to support the Sun SPARC Enterprise T5140 and T5240
servers.
The PEX 8548 is a highly flexible 48-lane PCIe switch. 2
PLX ExpressLane PEX 8548 PCIe switches each interface to a Sun UltraSPARC T2
Plus processor through a x8 PCIe link integrated directly into processor
silicon, which provides fanout to onboard devices and up to 6 x8 PCIe slots for
I/O expansion.
Unique key attributes include a remarkable low latency of 110ns, an
energy-saving low power requirement of only 4.9W (typical), flexible port
configurations (x1, x2, x4, x8, x16), true peer-to-peer communication, and
native Hot-Plug ports ensuring RAS (Reliability, Availability, Serviceability).
"As
the market leader in advanced PCIe interconnect solutions, PLX has delivered the
high-performance PCI Express technology requirements of key customers like Sun,"
said David Raun, VP of marketing and business development at PLX Technology. "Sun
demands very high-speed connectivity and quality of service, and we are pleased
that they find PLX products are exceeding all expectations."
Editor's
comments:- PCIe provides a low cost way to many high performance upgrade
options such as PCIe
SSDs.
SPARC T2 Gets Carrier Grade Linux
SAN JOSE, CA - April
16, 2008 - Wind River Systems, Inc. today announced it will port its
Carrier Grade Linux and Workbench development suite to Sun's
UltraSPARC T2 processor.
This will be the first carrier grade
Linux for Sun's CMT processors. Sun's Netra Carrier Grade rack servers and ATCA
blades will be the first CMT systems to run Wind River Carrier Grade Linux.
...Wind River
profile,
Operating Systems
for SPARC servers
Editor's comments:- in
SPARC's 20 year
history Linux software hasn't had much close contact with SPARC hardware -
and mainly featured as a competitor.
Despite that, I was surprised to
see that the word "Linux" appears on 24% of pages in
the
SPARC Product Directory.
That's more than I thought but probably 4x less often than in other
"Unix" publications.
In August 2003 (which was not a very
optimistic time for the SPARC market) I wrote an article -
What's the Trigger
Event that will Turn Around Sun's Revenue Decline? - in which I explored
all the technology and business options that could make a significant
difference to how the market viewed and reacted to Sun's SPARC products.
The
analysis in that article is just as relevant now and still makes good reading.
And I haven't changed a single word in this conclusion from that 5 years old
article.
"The future availability of a strong SPARC/Linux product
family will be beneficial to Solaris users - there will be a bigger market for
processors, and so faster SPARC processors will come out sooner and at lower
cost. It will cut down the arguments for users to migrate away from SPARC. It
will also offer a credible platform for Sun to attack HP and IBM. It will be
good for Sun, good for current and future SPARC users, and good for competition
in the computer market."
3 years after that article was published
HP wrote an (anti-Sun) article -
The
Real Story about Linux on Sun's SPARC - with some amusing and interesting
points about what they referred to as Sun's "on again, off again"
approach to Linux. That, and the stats quoted by HP may all be true, but I
think the new combination of SPARC T2 with Linux is going to reduce the bonuses
paid to many HP server sales people in the next year or so.
Sun Doubles SPARC Server Density (Again)
SANTA
CLARA, Calif - April 9, 2008 - Sun Microsystems, Inc. and Fujitsu
Limited today introduced the first dual-socket UltraSPARC T2 Plus based
servers.
The SPARC Enterprise T5140 and T5240 servers feature up
to 128 compute threads in 1U or 2U and deliver up to 16x higher
compute density than competitive dual socket x86 systems.
Meeting the
threat of Solaris
Migration offerings from competing vendors Sun has also addressed the issue
of customers with legacy applications running older versions of Solaris who want
to take advantage of lower cost / faster hardware. Sun announced 2 new offerings
which provide virtualization services to run Solaris 8 and Solaris 9
applications and help enable the simple transfer of applications to the latest
CMT systems running the Solaris 10 OS.
With these new products,
Solaris 8 and 9 Containers for the Solaris 10 OS, multiple Solaris 8 or Solaris
9 environments, or a combination of the two, can be hosted on a single
SPARC-based system. As a result, customers can streamline IT operations,
maximize datacenter space, and save on power, cooling and support costs.
The
move to the latest hardware is now de-coupled from the need to move directly to
the Solaris 10 OS.
Themis Founder, Bill Kehret, Joins VITA's Board
FREMONT,
California - April 3, 2008 - Themis Computer announced today that the
company has joined the VITA organization's board of directors.
William
E. Kehret, president and CEO of Themis Computer was appointed to the VITA board
of directors effective March 1, 2008. William "Bill" Kehret will fill
a position in VITA's expanded board membership. The appointment of Bill Kehret
reflects the organization's desire to strengthen its executive ranks and Bill's
vision will help VITA to continue its leadership role in the embedded computing
market.
As founder and CEO of Themis Computer, Bill Kehret brings a strong
technological background to the VITA board. Bill Kehret is also a member of
Themis' board of directors. Prior to founding Themis in 1989, he spent over 20
years in the embedded computing market, most of it managing the several
companies he helped found.
...Themis
Computer profile, Storage
Industry Trade Associations,
Storage People
Editor's
comments:- as someone who integrated over 100 different types of VME cards
in the late 1980s I never thought that VME would last so long. I didn't think
that SBus would be successful at first either. But within a few years of Sun
launching its SBus
in 1989 - it became a bigger market in revenue than VME.
VME always
supported multiple CPU architectures and operating systems, and it evolved and
has survived to the present day. SBus was never adopted outside the SPARC
market and Sun
transitioned SBus in 1997 in favor of PCI which first made its appearance
in a SPARC system in the SPARCengine Ultra AX.
SPARC Product Directory
featured VMEbus
SPARC SBCs and motherboards from over 10 oems in
SPARC's history.
These were:- Auspex Systems, DTK Computer, Force Computers, General
Micro Systems, Integrated Micro Products, Ironics, Men Mikro Electronik,
Solflower, Solbourne , Sun Microsystems and
Themis Computer,
the last of which is the only company to have stayed the VME SPARC SBC course.
SSDs are as hot a subject
today as SPARC was in the blazing years of the dotcom boom. 7 companies make
VMEbus form factor SSDs. I added a new entry for another VME SSD in our
SSD Buyers Guide
only a few days ago.
On the subject of
SSDs and things that have
been around a long time - Texas
Memory Systems celebrated 30 years making SSDs this week. | |
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Quorum - High
Availability & Workload
Management appliance from
Themis
Manage upto 50
servers in real-time, any
application, any server - 1 simple interface. | |
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Squeak! - the Fastest
Solid State Disks
Speed isn't everything, and it comes
at a price. |
But if
you do need the speediest
SSD then wading through the web sites of over 73 current
SSD oems to find a suitable
candidate slows you down.
And the SSD search problem will get even
worse. |
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I
predict there will be over 100 SSD oems in 2008.
I've done the
research for you to save you time. And this page is updated daily from
storage news and direct
inputs from oems. ...read
the article, | | |
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