deskside SPARC servers

See also:-

this entry has been archived because it's mentioned in SPARC History

manufacturer

model

description

Sun Microsystems

Ultra Enterprise Servers

In Q2 and Q3 1996 Sun announced a completely new family of server products:- Ultra Enterprise Servers . All models use Sun's 64 bit UltraSPARC CPU. The most significant part of the Enterprise server announcement was a new family of servers which replace the SPARCserver 1000E, and SPARCcenter 2000E. The "X000" models are based on a common set of new processor cards, and a new backplane, and include hardware and software support for high availability and system management in mission critical mainframe applications. The main differences between the 'X000" models is the number of cards, and storage capacity. Customers who purchase the entry level models can retain their investments in cards and storage if they later decide to add more power.

The X000 series includes models 3000, 4000, 5000, and 6000 which can be configured with from 2 to 30 CPU's, and upto 30 x 64 bit SBus channels. Memory can be expanded to 30G ECC protected RAM and over 10T of disk.

The X000 models use 2 types of card. A CPU card which can have 1 or 2 x 64 bit UltraSPARC processors, and an I/O expansion card which implements 2 x SBus slots. The cards are connected via a new packet switched backplane called Gigaplane which provides upto 2.6Giga bytes/sec peak performance, and an astonishing 2.5 Giga bytes/sec sustained throughput. (This is approximately 4 times faster than the peak performance of the XDS backplane in the earlier SPARCcenter 2000E.) Sun claims that the SBus implementation in these systems can deliver 400M bytes/sec peak from each 2 slot card. The memory latency is claimed to be 6 times faster than in previous Sun systems.

Reliability and fault tolerance features are designed into the Ultra Enterprise X000 servers in both software and hardware. Cards, power supplies and disks are hot swappable. Sun ships the systems with Solstice SyMon and other software which monitors internal operations, can predict failures, automatically restart tasks, and configure out a failed component.

New web optimised server software can increase performance by up to 6 times for Intranet and Internet applications. Sun's Scalable Cluster Interface (SCI) provides system and applications support for Ultra Enterprise Servers models 2 (desktop) through 6000. The technology provides fully redundant inter-node communication at 100M bytes/sec using SCI hardware from Dolphin Interconnect Solutions.

Solaris 2.5.1 upwards.

Sun Microsystems

Ultra Enterprise 150

The Ultra Enterprise 150 is a single CPU (167MHz) tower unit which includes a built in RAID with hot pluggable disks. Upto 12 x 2.1G hot-pluggable disks can be installed in this package (23" high x 10.5" wide x 27" deep.) External disk storage over 324G bytes using SPARCstorageArray. RAM 32M to 1G.

SPARC(R) is a registered trademark of SPARC International, Inc. SPARC PRODUCT DIRECTORY(SM) is a service mark of SPARC International, Inc used under license by ACSL. Products using the SPARC trademarks are based on an architecture developed by Sun Microsystems, Inc.