New "Galaxy" Line Of Sun Servers Tipped For 2005

Details of a new generation of Sun Microsystems servers, set for release sometime in 2005 and based on Advanced Micro Devices's Opteron processors, have emerged in a presentation document from a chief technologist for the company.

The new Galaxy line of servers should be released by the end of the year, according to the presentation by Ambreesh Khanna, chief technologist for x64 servers and the Solaris operating system in the company's U.S. client solutions division.

The line includes two high-end servers: A 4U eight-way server with up to 64GB of memory, eight PCI Express connection slots and four hard drives, and a 2U four-way server with 32GB of memory, six PCI Express slots and four hard disks. Also included are two lower-form servers: a 2U two-way server with 16GB of memory, 5 PCI-X slots and four hard disks, and a 1U two-way server with 16GB of memory, two PCI-X slots and two hard disks. Prices for the various units were not listed, and the presentation warns that final configurations and details could change before release.

The machines, in keeping with recent Sun strategy, will be optimized for Linux as well as Sun's Solaris and Java technologies.

The high end 4U server represents Sun's first foray into an eight-way Opteron-based server; currently, its top-end Opteron box, the Fire V40z, is a four-way box.The Galaxy information was part of a wider Sun platform strategy document that the company placed on its website briefly before it was withdrawn later in the day. It also examined Sun's ongoing plans to open Solaris while tuning it as a hardware-independent platform for virtualization that can permit thousands of applications and services to run on a single system and OS.

While the Opteron servers occupy some of the same space as Sun's proprietary UltraSparc server line, Sun has noted that Solaris's ZFS file system is designed to allow seamless disk and data transfer from Sparc machines to x86 machines without any performance degradation or incompatibilities.