Sun outlines new Galaxy server family

IDG News Service - An internal document briefly available on Sun Microsystems Inc.'s Web site has provided the first outline of the company's next generation of servers based on Advanced Micro Devices Inc.'s Opteron microprocessor. According to the document, a PDF presentation created by Ambreesh Khanna, a chief technologist in Sun's U.S. Client Solutions group, Sun plans to release four models of Galaxy servers by year's end.
Sun declined to comment on the document, which was briefly available online but was removed from Sun's site Friday afternoon.
On the road map are two entry-level servers: a 1U (1.75-in.-high) dual-processor server with two PCI-X (Peripheral Component Interconnect-Extended) slots, two hard drives and up to 16GB of RAM; and a larger, 2U system that can contain the same amount of processors and memory but will have four hard drives and five PCI-X slots.
At the high end will be two 4U machines, one that will support four processors and as much as 32GB of memory and a second, eight-way system with as much as 64GB of memory. Both of the systems will have four hard drives and support the PCI Express interconnect, but the eight-way machine will have eight PCI Express connections, two more than the four-way system.
The computer maker has been unusually tight-lipped about this line of servers, code-named Galaxy, which are being designed by Sun co-founder Andreas Bechtolsheim.
Bechtolsheim left Sun in 1995 but returned in February 2004 when the server design company he founded, Kealia, was acquired by Sun. His team has been working on Galaxy since the acquisition, but until now Sun has provided very few details about the servers.
In February, Bechtolsheim said that Sun expected its new AMD systems to outperform Intel Corp.'s Xeon products in both clusters of two-way servers and larger multiprocessor servers. Sun is working on a dozen such systems, he said at the time.
Galaxy will also include ultrathin Opteron blade servers designed to fit into the same chassis as Sun's blade servers based on its Sparc processors, said Geoff Arnold, a distinguished engineer in Sun's CTO office, in a recent Web log entry.
With Galaxy, Sun has carved out a unique niche for itself as a provider of large-scale Opteron systems, but it may be taking a few risks, said Gordon Haff, an analyst at Illuminata Inc. in Nashua, N.H. For one thing, Sun's current Opteron products are promoted as "edge" servers to be used for tasks like Web serving or file-and-print serving. The high-end Galaxy systems, however, will be appropriate for data center