Simon’s Blog

OK - here’s the highlights, right as they happen at Sun’s launch for their new Niagara chip and servers based on the chips.

11:04 (ET) People are taking their seats

11:05 The announcer said the program will begin in about three minutes

11:10 Scott McNealy - the Sun CEO - takes the stage. He’s dressed smartly! “Today is about cool threads!”

11:14 Talking about Solaris 10, and Open Solaris; and M&A

11:16 In x64 space, reminds people that Sun has gone from 99 to number 4 or 6 (depending on who you talk to) vendor. And talking about the Fujitsu partnership on UltraSPARC next-generation product-line. And Oracle, Microsoft and Google partnerships.

11:18 Re-caps on UltraSPARC IV+ launch. Two horse race between Sun and IBM with their Power 5 chips.

11:20 Now getting to the UltraSPARC T1 (Niagara)… “The Information Age is history”. It’s not about subscribing anymore, it’s now about participation. Expecting 500M new participants on the Internet in the new few years.

11:22 The environment matters. Space matters. Technology and computing environments are going to be major players are addressing these issues. Manhattan costs $53 per square foot, and more than twice as expensive in London and Tokyo.

11:26 Software as a service is where things are going. Volume matters. Communities matter. Easier to monetise a large community a little at a time, than get a large amount of cash from a few people. “Open will always win”.

11:29 Open Solaris - 75% of 3.4 million downloads are for non-SPARC hardware. 19,000 applications are available on Solaris. Re-caps on launch of FOSS Sun software.

11:31 John Thompson - Symantec CEO - on stage. World between Enterprise and Consumer is starting to blur. People want access to their compute environments wherever they are.

11:35 John Thompson says the new T1 (Niagara box) looks awesome. Symantec put their Brightmail anti-spam product on it, and it worked well out of the box.

11:43 Faster can be cooler, better can be cleaner, faster can be greener. David Yen - Scalable Systems Group at Sun - on stage. Announces the SunFire T1000 and T2000 servers. 5X performance, 1/5 power consumption, 1/4 the space compared with competition. Beats “industry standard”x86 pricing. Same packaging as the Galaxy Opteron-based servers.

11:45 SunFire T1000 starts at $2995, T2000 starts at $7795.
Doesn’t yet say how many cores you get for those prices.

11:48 Shows UltraSPARC T1 processor. Power efficiency, space advantage. Eight 64-bit SPARC cores, executing 32 threads on a chip. 9.6 billion operations per second. A rack of these boxes, equivalent to over a 1000 regular single CPU boxes. Energy used by the chip same as a light bulb. Homogeneous temperate across the chip, which runs cool = high reliability.

11:52 Showing the design of the boxes. T1000 - 8 DDR2 DIMs, up to 16GB RAM, PCI Express. T2000 - same processor, twice as much RAM. More PCI Express slots, redundant hot swap power supply and cooling. Fewer parts than hardware from IBM, HP and Dell.

11:56 VP Marketing Scalable Systems - Fred Kohout - on stage. T1000 and T2000 servers - 8 new world records being announced. 1) RSA Security benchmark: 6X throughput Dell Xeon, 10X throughput IBM Power 5. https runs almost as fast as http on Niagara. 2. SPECjbb2005 (java business) - 2.1X faster than Dell Xeon. 3. SPEC Web2005 3.2X IBM Xeon, 1.7X Power 5+. 4) Lotus E6 3.1X faster IBM Xeon. 5) SAP world record T2000 beats HP.

12:00 Price. T1000 $2995 compared with Dell 1850 over $4,000. Same story compared with T2000 and Dell.

12:02 Perspectives on systems from partners and customers. eBay have been testing the new servers - 150 million community members. Heather Peck - senior manage, system engineering - on stage at eBay/PayPal. She runs 6-8 thousand servers - represents $1300 per second in transactions, 60M items on sale at anyone time. Number one scalability problem is power. First server she’s been excited about in the last five years. Gives better availability for customers. She doesn’t quantify the benefits.

12:06 Don Grantham - EVP Sun Services - on stage. T1000 and T2000 will be connectable to the Sun Connection platform - will automatically connect to get OS updates etc. New full protection plans = server + software + services. Total price for three years silver $4,723, platinum $7395; T200 silver is $9787, platinum $13,005 - claims half the price cf with equivalent Dell suport. Compare T1000 protection in another way e.g. Dell 1850 $5985, IBM x346 $6192 - Sun better level of support (4 hour response time to hardware failuter for Sun, compared with 2 business day with Dell?) - 27% cheaper prices.

12:15 Back to Fred. How to evaluate rack servers? Want to introduce a new method SWaP - space (S), watts (W), performance (P). Measre is P / (S * W) = SWaP rating. For example T1000 - Lotus benchmark: 19,000 lotus notes users/ Space (2RU) * 312 Watts = SWaP 30.4. Higher is better in SWaP units. T1000 is 4 - 14 times more efficient compared with Dell and IBM. T2000 4- 10 times more efficient.

12:20 Larry Lozon - VP Data Center Services, EDS - on stage. EDS manages 300 data centers, 250,000 servers, 4,000,000 end user devices. Pain points - customers looking for lower costs, in long-term contracts. Willing to trade off price against moving to standard packages, utility computing. Rising energy costs are a problem. EDS have been testing the new servers. Taken internal work portal - 6 million hits per day - 48 rack units to 4 rack units. 5,000 watts down to 800 watts.
Can win more business without having to expand facilities, can consolidate existing services for customers.

12.30 Data Center Simulator software for planning data centers available from sun.com

12:33 Onto financial servicess. Tested an application on T1000 on a server. During testing, increased performance without recompiling and retesting.

12:35 Announce try and buy evaluation program.

12:36 Scott McNeally back on stage. Brings Charles Phillips - Oracle President - on stage. Oracle got early access to new servers. One Oracle engineer said, “Performance pinned his ears back”. Oracle application strategy is around Java - CMT good for that. Solaris 64-bit is Oracle’s development platform of choice. Oracle pricing model for 32-thread boxes - big announcement - process factor is 0.25. An eight-core machine priced as if it was a two-processor SMP box. Scott - “Yes! Tell Larry I’ll ride on his boat again!” Charles - “All I can say is - you better a sell a lot of these!”

12:41 Sun thinks they’re five years ahead of the competition, if you believe the competitor’s road map.

12:42 Want to drive Open Source Revolution further. Open Sourceing Niagara, and all the related tools. Talking to the community to make sure they get the rules right - in the way they did the JCP. Working with Tim O’Reilly on this.

12:44 Tim O’Reilly on video: “Sun is the original Open Source company… It’s possible that having access to a new chip design could stimulate the community… can we extend reusability from software to chip design?”

12:47 CoolThreads prize for innovation. Goal to generate the most innovative app for the new server. $50K prize. Initial submissions due in March.

That’s all folks…