Sun makes volume play with four-way server

IDG News Service - Sun Microsystems Inc. today continues its fight for the volume systems market by announcing three new products, including a new four-way server priced under $16,000.
The Sun Fire V440 will be one of three new systems the hardware vendor plans to unveil at its Sun Network show in San Francisco this week. Also planned is the Sun Blade 1500 workstation and the first update to Sun's line of tower servers since the late 1990s: the Sun Fire V250.
The V440 is a rack-mounted system that will have less memory and less-powerful processors than Sun's current entry-level four-way offering, the V480. But with list pricing ranging from $10,000 to $26,000, it will also be much less expensive, said Souheil Saliba, vice president of marketing and strategy for Sun's volume system products. "The 480 and the 440 address two different spaces. The 440 is essentially half the price point of the 480."
One of the chief differences between the two systems will be at the microprocessor level. The V440 will use the UltraSparc IIIi processor with 1MB of Level 2 cache per processor. The V480 uses the UltraSparc III with 8MB of cache per chip.
For some applications, however, the V440 looks like it might make an excellent low-cost alternative to its more pricy relative. The two systems performed almost identically during an electronic design automation application benchmark run by Texas Instruments Inc., according to Chris Davis, the company's worldwide IT strategy manger for semiconductor design IT.
Davis has been testing a beta version of the V440 for three months as a possible replacement for some old Sun systems TI is using for chip design. Based on the price and performance of the systems, he said he would take the V440 over the V480, should he eventually make a purchase. "Within the scope of what I am doing at TI, which is a pretty narrow scope relative to Sun's entire marketplace, the 440 looks like the best fit," he said.
Volume systems are an increasingly important market for Sun, as IT managers are shifting their buying from Sun's traditional midrange and high-end systems to less expensive machines like the V480 and V440, according to IDC analyst Jean Bozman. "IT managers are generally adding to their infrastructure by adding servers that way because there's so much pressure on IT budgets.
"Volume servers are selling well in general, and Sun has had success in the volume server space," she said, noting that the V480 has sold well since its introduction in June 2002.
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