Sun advances partnership with Intel; extends design and innovation with Intel XEON server

As companies have downsized and budgets are constrained, businesses are seeking new alternatives to stay ahead of the competition, while offering the best services to their customers, and improving their bottom line.

Extending its leadership in system design innovation and continuing its lead to gain x86 market share, Sun brings system design expertise and innovations to x86 Computing.

The Nehalem portfolio comprising seven new systems will be added to Sun's SunFire range.

Building on more than 25 years of enterprise expertise and design innovation, with this launch Sun brings to market a versatile line of flash-ready x86 systems and blades, key system innovations and open networking technologies to the Intel Xeon processor 5500 series to deliver breakaway efficiency and intelligent scale to the datacenter.

Patrick Swoboda, Volume Systems Manager for Sun Microsystems explains, "New requirements are emerging in today's datacenter; Compute, storage, software and network are isolated, hindering datacenter efficiency. Server and storage sprawl is adding complexity and limits for power and cooling, and real estate are maxed out, and energy costs are rising while IT budgets remain stagnant."

"Keeping the business up and running 24/7 is table stakes and finding affordable ways to use IT as a strategic competitive advantage is the new business standard in today's global market. But current solutions are proprietary, complex and expensive, and are unsustainable for emerging technologies and applications that are making its way into the mainstream like commercial HPC and Web 2.0," Swoboda says.

Swoboda adds, "Leading the industry in datacenter efficiency and intelligent scale, Sun delivers the industry's most versatile line of flash-ready x86 servers and blades for business, web and HPC architectures - bringing system design excellence and innovations to unlock the enterprise capabilities of the Intel Xeon processor 5500 series,"

With more than two decades of technological expertise and design excellence for Business, Web and HPC architectures, Sun's Nehalem will deliver breakaway efficiency and intelligently scale with new flash-ready x86 systems and blades. Its key features in the Solaris OS and new system design innovations will unlock the enterprise capabilities of the Intel Xeon processor 5500 series like no other x86 platform on the market today.

"We see big market opportunities to grow our x86, HPC, web-infrastructure business in the region with Nehalem. Financial Services, Oil & Gas, and Telcos can benefit from better application and system performance within a tight budget while minimizing datacenter space, power and cooling, and the ease of integrated solutions. The Nehalem portfolio is ideal for customers seeking reliable alternatives to quickly achieve better datacenter efficiency and scale seamlessly without added complexity," added Swoboda.

With the XEON 5500 Series, Sun is combining open source technologies and Sun IP like Sun's new Open Storage platform, SSD Flash technology, ultra dense InfiniBand switching and the Solaris OS and MySQL to optimize performance, energy efficiency and scale in the datacenter.

Able to seamlessly integrate into existing rack or blade architecture or OS platform (Solaris, Linux or Windows), the flexibility and price/performance of Sun' s new flash-ready x86 systems make them ideal platforms for virtualization helping to further maximize and optimize current and new IT infrastructure investments.