Sun shines over Niagara

Pragati Simlote

NEW DELHI: Having firmly reestablished itself as the number one UNIX platform server vendor in the world, Sun is now betting on its ULTRASPARC T1 processor for growth.

The UltraSPARC T1 processor features SPARC-based CoolThreads technology and eight cores--each having four threads--for a total of 32 threads that work simultaneously that so many tasks are parallely performed with no delay.

The company claims that the chip saves energy, while increasing system throughput and employs Sun's radical Chip Multithreading (CMT) processor architecture to keep pace with the multi-threaded application environment of the Internet.

“We have recently come out with a revolutionary chip design called CMT and the processor is called ULTRASPARC T1. We have series of servers emerging on the T1 processor. This is a unique product in the industry, as normally one would associate multicore processors to have two cores. This T1 processor has eight cores and each core executing four simultaneous threads, so technically its 32-blade server,” said Krithiwas Neelakantan, general manager, Sun Microsystems India systems vertical.

“The class of machines built on the T1 processor are codenamed Niagara. That’s the future of our processors. The T1 processor is three-quarters-old and is a significant part of our product strategy. It is being accepted very well in the market as we will pack more threads and more cores as we move along.”

The Sun server portfolio products can be broadly classified under two domains – those that run – SPARC V9 architecture. Second are those which are based on the AMD Opteron 64 bit processor, which run Windows, Linux and Solaris, etc. Going forward, the company plans to ride on Solaris.

Neelakantan said, “We will continue to invest and focus on the ULTRASPARC 4+ processor features plus the CMT strategy based on the T1 processor. We will continue to innovate on the processor and the operating systems level.

There are several new features on Solaris 10 that we have recently announced that add significant value to the customer as well as the application vendors who build applications on top of it. So we would continue to take the price performance operational cost leadership as far as our high-end server is concerned. So we would drive that strategy very aggressively.”

Sun is a significant player in server consolidation and virtualization and has also partnered with VMware to deliver consolidation and virtualization services to its customers.

“We are ahead of the curve in terms of our consolidation and virtualization strategy and have been delivering dynamic domain on our servers for several years now. We have a very mature technology – customers can do server consolidation onto our servers. We are also doing something very similar on the X86 side,” Neelakantan said.

The company is currently focusing on datacenters - reducing operational cost, increasing availability and serviceability of its servers. Sun’s products are built for two types of markets: business computing and technical computing. The company also has vertical focused products.

Neelakantan said, “We deliver solutions which are very specific to various industries. We aggressively pursue the telecom – communication industry, manufacturing, BFSI, education research and healthcare.”

He added, “We have also invested significantly in the retail space. We think that the market growth on retail in India is very high. Sophistication, market pressure and market dynamics are no different as those in the US. Competition is also very intense in this sector and the need of the hour is running highly operationally efficient systems. As margins are very low, adoption of IT is the only way to increase their bottomline.”

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