Sun Introduces Eco-Friendly Servers
Sun on Tuesday ushered in a new era for the company by introducing a line of servers using its UltraSparc T1 processor, code-named Niagara. Rather than focusing on megahertz, Sun says, developers instead looked to pack more throughput onto each piece of silicon.
The first two servers to use the Niagara chip will be the SunFire T1000 and T2000 servers, introduced at the company's quarterly launch event in New York on Tuesday.
The result is a much more powerful and smaller server, and more environmentally friendly to boot. "There needed to be a fundamental change at the design level," Sun's director of marketing for scalable systems Fadi Azhari told BetaNews.
Azhari spoke of server sprawl, where IT departments are adding more and more servers, which in turn are using more power and thus more natural resources. From now on, Sun's will focus on the amount of power consumption used by a single server as well as other environmental factors, even down to what materials are used to make the machines.
With the new Niagara servers, Sun is providing five times the performance at one-fifth of the power and one-fourth of the space of servers in its same class, Azhari said.
From now on, all servers from Sun would be judged by that same metric: performance, power and space. "Those are the fundamentals. It's going to be a key metric for people to look at" as they plan their new IT departments," Azhari said.
However, the company will focus primarily on the power consumption aspect according to Sun officials. "Power is our chief concern," said Rick Hetherington, engineering chief for the Niagara systems.
If all the world's Web servers were replaced with half the number of Niagara based systems, Sun says carbon-dioxide emissions would be cut by the same amount as planting a million trees. "We believe we cannot continue like this," Azhari argues. "You have to solve the power consumption problem. Greener can be faster."
Sun also hopes that the Niagara chip can change the company's fortunes financially as well. Sun's revenue declined 5.3 percent last quarter, while competitor IBM saw a 4.1 percent increase, and HP server revenue jumped 11.5 percent.
The changes in Sun's finances have also led the company to look into ways to cut the prices of its entry-level servers, while expanding support for a variety of platforms and offering customers a subscription based model for buying hardware and software.
According to Sun, these new servers are only the beginning. In addition to expanding the "eco-responsible" initiative gradually over the next few years to its other product lines, there are bigger plans for the Niagara platform as well.
Niagara-based blade servers are due up next summer, and in 2007 the chip will receive a refresh allowing for smaller circuitry. An advanced manufacturing processes will also add new features to the chip including multi-processor support.